I live in China, Beijing to be exact. I believe that western media is again not really reporting what is happening here.
People here are not protesting for democracy, but for easing of lockdowns. That several people are shouting "We want democracy" means absolutly nothing, this is enormous country with 4.5 Population of US. You can find people yelling "We want emperor back". Majority people are pissed, because they follow world cup and see that nobody is wearing mask. For example on protest in Beijing they were shouting that they are patriots, and want lockdowns to end.
As for protest, what I was surprised, is how fast have they worked. In less than week, they have starting easing measures. Guangzhou (big city in south) has removed all measures.
In West people were literally called Nazis, conspiracy theorist, anti science for over a year when they were fighting lockdowns. DeSantis was called crazy for opening Florida. Gavin Newsome in Commiefornia was decimating small business with lockdowns. In Europe (continent where I was born) protestors were beaten by the police. Australia had interment camps. Canada and their truckers not to mention (who were called white supremacist for wanting easier Covid measures).
I am not saying this to show how China is good, but how bad thing are in US. Government and MSM were absolutly out of control for 2 years, any descent was punished to same level as CPC is doing in China. Only ironically their protest actualy worked, and in US you still have idiots doing double masking an Dr Fauci is waking free man.
Only if you live in Beijing can you tell the rest of us what’s happening there. I agree with everything you said about the USA and Canada. What we went through in the USA the last almost three years is unforgivable. Democrat politicians and media are fully to blame as they blocked our ability to have the freedoms that we expect. They loved seeing the fighting and division going on and counted it as a win for them. The doctors that were silenced by them are the ones who science has proven to be correct. Meanwhile Fauci, on his farewell media tour, is still talking about masks and school closures depending on viral load in local area. And now, because of all those mentioned, along with the head of the largest teachers union and the CDC, we’re stuck with the disaster our country has turned into.
No one in the US is protesting for less freedom, at least not ordinary people. Normal mechanisms of political response have broken down, and the people have lost collective control over basic policies and how their government functions. A once-free media is complicit.
We no longer have functioning, representative parties and instead look to personality cults to save us. Trump fits into this pattern, but the pattern started in 2008 with Obama.
That is nonsense. The SC gave the authority to the states for the "people" in the states to decide. The states, and people in the states, "get back" the power rightly belong to them. That is the full meaning of the SC striking down of Rowe. It was wrongly decided and unconstitutional.
Comprof is a troll, please don't feed the trolls. That account leaves divisive and insulting comments on every article. It's always to elicit a reaction and an argument, never productive or even respectful on a basic level.
Not a troll at all. Just someone who is concerned about all the freedoms that have been taken away from Americans. I feel....like I live in E. Germany in 80s.
Twitter is a private company. You don't have a constitutional right to use twitter. Free speech means free from government interference. As in men with guns won't come to your house, arrest you and/or beat the crap out of you.
In China people from the government will arrest you and beat you up for complaining about the government. Here in the US you obviously feel free to post here without that fear.
"Democrat politicians and media are fully to blame"
No. If politicians were really to blame they would have been tossed 3 weeks ago. Instead, the vast majority of them retained their thrones. Newsome, Whitmer, Pritzker, Hochul, et el, and dozens of Congressmen were all given a thumbs up by their constituents.
Those who didn't vote, allowed those who did vote to control the narrative. The 40% of conservatives who didn't bother to vote could have swung the election massively in favor of a pro-freedom, anti-socialism agenda.
Right... so they didn't much care about that 2 years of treatment. Can't blame a politician when he/she's just doing the bidding of those who vote for them.
I would argue that the politicians are not doing the bidding for their constituents, but rather for themselves, the special interests, and the squeakiest wheels. I do blame the voters, but I also blame the politicians (on both sides of the aisle) for their greediness, lack of integrity, and failure to do what is right for their constituents and our nation.
I don't know, but I read the other day that 55% of Republicans voted (actually, a higher number than Democrats this cycle). That leaves a lot of potential voters sitting out.
This is what infuriates me. Those who endlessly complain about how things are, but did not vote, nor act in any way to make real change; these people make me want to censor them.
It was the perfect opportunity for them to go against what Trump had wanted, and I’m no fan of Trump. Once the economy was shut down, it was a full road ahead for them to do what they did. I had to laugh at the comments I saw for two years…”Thank you, Gov Whitmer, for keeping us safe.” Uhh…you couldn’t keep yourself safe? I sure knew how! And the main reason why she won was bc of the Roe overturn. But I will partially agree…there are some very successful but stupid liberals who fell for her so-called Covid protection.
I’m not sure I think the Democrats have got a stranglehold on the elections, they don’t care how they win them as long as they retain the power. Take Arizona for eg the same voting system as 2020 and the same county Maricopa as having the most problems. Going forward to 2024 I doubt very much will change. I’m sure by then we will probably be voting on Fakebook or MSM it’s a terrifying thought both ways.
Yeah.....can't believe they were ok with their kids being screamed at all day in school about how they're oppressors and watching their daughter's soccer team being taken over by trans kids.
Where is the ever senile Joe on all of this. He hasn't condemned China for its brutality. He did not condemn Cuba for brutally breaking up protests. He hasn't condemned Iran for murdering women and killing protestors.
I believe the latest revaluations on Hunter's laptop prove the ever senile joe is in the pockets of China. Could he also be the pockets of Cuba and Iran?
I doubt Cuba. They are broke. Maybe Joe just agrees with dictatorial regimes and won't condemn them. After all he tries to rule by mandate.
And to think Linda with “our free and fair election system” we voted for this twice 2020 and 2022. It beggars belief at times and this is America, it’s becoming rather unsettling to watch how this is unfolding. I agree the Democrats and the media are fully to blame for our story. My family are wondering how this is all going to end, I’m really nervous to say to them not well unfortunately
No, it's not the Dems and the media. It's weak uninspiring leadership (really the bereft leadership) of the RNC. There are so many things they could have done with aggressive truthful ads about the Dems. Joe, Hunter, AOC and her squad of radical antisemites/communists.
Ads saying don't turn our state into California, showing homeless defecating on the street, shooting up drugs and the government sanctioned lawlessness, no bail, not enforcing shoplifting laws, releasing thousands of pedophiles from prison I could go on and on. The RNC are wusses.
It wasn't the media that sunk the GOP, it was spinelessness.
February 2020 through to the end of that year Trump was in charge and allowed many of the lockdowns you blame on somebody else. The fighting and division - I think it suited him too, as he backtracked on the health measures he initially supported.
To his credit (not that you might think so) he had also the temerity to fast track a vaccine (imagine that!) that was available more or less by the end of the year.
You want to spread blame, go right ahead. Just include everybody..
I came here to say the same and you said it better. This article is overly sensationalized. I was in Beijing in 1989. Today's protests are in different nature, organization (thanks Apple for working with the CCP), and scale.
Btw, they didn't loosen up in Guangzhou. They said they would, but when you ask people who actually live there, they didn't, just like they supposedly loosened up in Beijing - they didn't.
Finally, I wanted to point out that today's democratic party is closer to the CCP than you would imagine. I hope American voters are warned watching what's unfolding in China.
That's an odd thing to say. The Nazi's were explicitly a national socialist party and the fascists in Italy were an offshoot of Italian socialists (Mussolini get kicked out of the party so he started a new one).
Thanks for the observations. I believe the author's unwritten point is that demonstrations about the lockdowns and deaths can easily spark a much broader movement of resistance to the CCP. Maybe that's wishful thinking, but it does have precedent in other places.
I disagree that these protest will change anything, for simple reason in 2-3 months nobody will care and people will forget and go eitj their own lifes.
Cuomo & Democrats have send god knows how many people to their deaths to nursing homes in New York.
Did we see major shift in political spectrum in New York?
In Canada Trudeau was doing stuff that would make CPC blush, did we see major change was he voted out?
Gavin Newsom destroyed countless lifes in California, did he got recalled?
In all 3 cases there was desent, but no change in government (Cuomo had to resign for being sexual predator). In California and New York majority of voters voted like sheep to keep current regime.
Fauci lied for 3 years, everyone know it, trough his policie he destroyed countless lifes, and still majority of democrats treat him like hero (jist shows how powerful MSM brainwash on average democrat is)
These protest will die down very soon, because majority of people will forget and simply wont care, as soon as measures are eased
"Fauci lied for 3 years, everyone know it, trough his policie he destroyed countless lifes, and still majority of democrats treat him like hero..."
Fauci is a hero to the left because he demonstrated and applied POWER. He held the nation under his thumb with a combination of pseudo-science, celebrity worship and moral certitude amplified by 24/7 media hagiography. He slinks into history - his reputation destroyed by the facts.
Thanks for commenting, Raziel. Only Tucker via the Daily Mail is covering this that I can find; he is showing the video of tanks reminiscent of 1989. I remember seeing my counterpart guarding a minefield on his side of the fence in the same year. Pay attention, people.
Of course people are protesting for democracy. It’s human nature to yearn for freedom. But those sufficiently informed of what democracy means know that full-on democracy is a pipe dream at this stage, so they’re trying for a tiny slice of that pie, i.e., the freedom to walk the streets and voice their opinions. The relaxing of lockdowns is a step in that direction.
I agree with you about the lunacy of lockdowns imposed by politicians in US and Canada (you can add New Zealand and Australia to that shameful list). They were rooted in perverse medical advice, which gave cover to the power-mad politicians and bureaucrats, of whom Dr. Fauci was most conspicuous.
How do we correct this now especially with an administration hell bent on keeping us restricted. We need to focus on getting all our students back in school without masks our population back to work, the focus from the Democrats and the MSM is everywhere else’s the moment.
That to me reads like propaganda. The lockdowns would not be so draconian if the population was armed, or if elections mattered. You cannot separate what the government does from what it is allowed to do.
And yes, a lot of stupid and indefensible things happened in supposedly democratic nations. But those were examples of unregulated authoritarianism, were they not, and not of the systems as they should have operated, on a basis of REAL science and the consent of the governed?
Kishore Mahbubani argues that most Chinese rate the CCP as highly competent. There were certainly frustrations with the draconian lockdowns, but as Raziel notes this isn't a mass protest movement agitating for democracy. In fact, I see little evidence that there’s a desire for Western style democracy on a mass scale in China today.
The irony is that most Chinese find the CCP to be reasonably competent, though of course certainly not perfect. On the other hand, Americans are the ones who are primarily advocating for the overthrow of the CCP and denigrating the brutality of Chinese governance. The disconnect reminds me of how liberal elites generally have a softer view towards crime than actual members of the Black community, many of whom live in high crime neighborhoods and have to deal with the consequences of rampant criminality daily.
As is now being reported, major cities are now shifting their lockdown policies in response to the protests. The Chinese government has generally shown a tendency to be responsive to the needs of the people. Post-Mao, the CCP has overseen the greatest uplifting of its citizens out of poverty in human history. This doesn't align with the picture of a vicious regime that only cares about its own survival at the expense of everything else. I believe it's more accurate to describe the CCP as paternalistic rather than despotic.
So you work for the Chinese security and propaganda apparatus? I get it.
You know, Mao killed some 50 million Chinese through sheer incompetence, combined with a sociopathic indifference to their suffering. He also led an inter-generational mass murder of wise and decent human beings, in the name of an abstraction which mostly involved a narcissistic desire to promote himself and his agenda. Yet his picture is everywhere.
And even now the Uighurs would dispute the humaneness of the CCP. So would those in Hong Kong. So would the Falun Gong. So would ANYONE who fails to mouth the ridiculous lies that Communists force their prey to mouth everywhere they seize dictatorial power.
You may be right that they don't want American style democracy. But they don't want Xi for life, and they don't want social credit scores to determine the course of their own and their childrens lives. Only genuinely sick people defend this abusive and horrific regime.
And the prosperity only dates to the early 90's, when free market forces were eventually allowed to work relatively unimpeded. Communism was an absolute disaster in every possible way, and the CCP should now be renamed the Fascist Party of China. That is what it is. There is no Communism. There is an oligarchy which seeks its own wealth and privilege backed by a powerful internal military trained to beat, arrest, torture and murder dissidents who refuse to be silenced by the usual method of the social credit score and threats.
At the risk of coming across as repetitive, data suggests that most Chinese view the CCP as highly competent. The recent protests against the lockdowns are more of an aberration than the norm for CCP rule post-Mao. And in this case it seems as if many cities are already starting to recalibrate Covid policies in response to the protests, which is suggestive of a government attuned to the needs of its people. The CCP may overtly crack down in many cases in order to maintain public order but it usually adjusts its policies behind the scenes in response to the needs of the people.
Mao is revered today not because of the excesses of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which many admit were grave errors, but because he finally managed to unite China in 1949 after the Century of Humiliation. The aging and decrepit Qing dynasty collapsed in 1912 after decades of increasing incompetence, with depredations inflicted on China by both Japan and the West. China went through periods of warlordism and internecine warfare between the KMT and the CCP in the ensuing decades. It wasn't until 1949 that modern China was finally unified again as a country in control of it own destiny.
Then and now, Chiang Kai Shek would have been a VASTLY better leader of China. Wherever you are now economically, you would have been there 60 years ago.
And you know, Saddam Hussein regularly polled quite well too. Nobody publicly opposed him. Everyone publicly loved him.
And the simple reason was that anyone who complained disappeared, and it was well known most of them were tortured and killed in a variety of ways. China operates to this day Gulags which are called Laogai. You know this. Don't act like you don't.
Please don't treat us as if we are stupid. Many Americans are, which is why your propaganda has ANY chance, but by and large not here. What you need are people who know nothing about anything.
Chiang Kai-shek ruled over Taiwan as the head of an authoritarian military regime that perpetrated the White Terror. Martial law wasn't ended until 1987 by his son Chiang Ching-kuo. The first democratic presidential election in Taiwan wasn't held until 1996.
Towards the latter stages of the Chinese Civil War, the American political establishment became increasingly dillusioned with Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT, in particular over the KMT's perceived corruption and incompetence.
Comparing China today to Iraq under Saddam Hussein is asinine.
Formosa then Taiwan lived in perennial fear both of a Communist Chinese invasion, and of subversion from within by agents the lunatic Communists no doubt cultivated and where possible inserted. It was not without reason they feared that the brutal Red Chinese would do to them what they did to the Tibetans.
And despite all this, Chiang Kai Shek and the KMT were VASTLY, VASTLY less violent than the Communists. As you KNOW, Mao more or less forced most of the nation into an extended period of mass starvation, and most scholars estimate some 50 million Chinese died as a direct result. And the White Terror killed perhaps 18,000 people, probably most of them guilty.
The Cultural Revolution killed AT LEAST hundreds of thousands of people.
Here is the thing: you cannot be an honest Communist. That beast does not exist. What Communists do is break things and then lie about it. Here, you act as if you are in a position to be morally outraged about the actions CKS and the KMT undertook to prevent being overtaken by Communists, but ALSO free to ignore ENTIRELY the vastly larger crimes of the criminal regime you are even now defending.
And what is asinine about comparing the Fascistic government of China--where a small elite has grown immensely rich using the power of the State to compel what in millions of cases amounts to literal slavery--to Iraq? I think China is WORSE than Iraq in its worst days.
You tell me: what happens to people who criticize the regime publicly? Are they given a fair hearing? Nonsense. Depending on who they are, they either disappear, are publicly rebuked, risk retalIation against their families (EVEN OVERSEAS!!), and at a MINIMUM see their social credit score lowered, and access to basic human rights curtailed.
No, you are defending a brutal regime that is comparable to the worst of Franco or Mussolini, wit the difference that you are vastly more violent, much less tolerant, and utterly unable to EVER speak a word of honest truth.
They must retain some pride as a nation. If they lose that they will collapse. It's a real tightrope act criticizing your government while maintaining a semblance of national pride. We are having the same problem here, where patriotic acts are labeled as "insurrection".
If we do recover and finally humble the purveyors of socialism, will those dedicated to it ever recover their pride, or will they assume that their nation has failed?
Socialism is mostly driven by ignorance and thoughtlessness. Our nations honest history withstands scrutiny well. We have done many bad things and have had many flaws, but I would happily compare our worst moments with the average moments of most other nations.
So, assuming that recovery somehow consists in surmounting the propaganda apparatus through accurate information, and the stimulation of honest independent thought, I would say no. All tolerably intelligent people will realize we did them a favor.
And "patriotism as insurrection" obviously is a stupid idea that was crafted to make traps for fools. It has worked in many cases, but if and when we get full disclosure on FBI, Capital Police and other involvement, it will be untenable for all but the most psychotic.
After having been there a few times you make a good point about the people there being ambivalent about communism because their point of reference is... state provided everything with a slice of caplitalism to keep people quiet(communism). What makes me far more nervous about world stability is that Western 'elites' are favorable to the Chinese model. Tim Cook of Apple just admitted such. I mean, that is an American company praising communism. Very unsettling for those of us who have lived communism or near it.
Obviously, Tim Cook has zero intention of living by the rules he thinks should apply to the rest of us. "Communism", per say, is just a means of reviving oligarchic elitism and class hierarchy using language that still appears to conform to Liberal standards. All the language is lies, of course. Tim Cook is a liar, a thief, and a bully. This is all latent in his abdication of the most basic principles of human decency.
I don't like Alex Jones. I can't watch him. But he and people like him have been talking for a long time about this global class of people who want a global government of us, by them, for them. And we now know that is pretty much exactly what the World Economic Forum is. They have gotten open about it, not least because their propaganda has made so many people so stupid that they can say things that would have infuriated everyone in the US, across the spectrum, just 30 years ago.
Agree, brother. Alex Jones... Don't care for his schtick, but he was right. So was Trump who did everything he could to put a stop to the 'Great Reset' and they took him out for it. They are still trying to.
Like a father ruling over his sometimes wayward children? As in censoring what they read and what they see? As in no right to free assembly if it is against the regime? As in no elections in deciding who will govern them? As in no right to write and publish freely? As in no right to criticize the government in print or online? As in no right to organize a political party to oppose the regime in power?
You are writing on a thread that would not exist in China, for Chinese.
Censorship and democracy are two different things. Personally I'm against the CCP's censorship but there's little to suggest that masses of Chinese people want Western style democracy. In any case, there are myriad ways to get around the censors in China. Oftentimes it's more of an inconvenience than anything else.
Japan is often held up as an erstwhile democratic ally, but apart from 1993-1994 and 2009-2012, the LDP has been in power continuously since 1955. Japan is virtually a one party state. No one in China is clamoring to live in democratic India. What Chinese people mostly want is for a government more responsive to its needs. The recent shift in Covid policy suggests that the Chinese government is recalibrating in response to the protests. For a supposedly despotic regime, the CCP post-Mao seems surprisingly attuned to the needs of its people.
I hate repeating myself but the attitude of many commenters here eerily mirrors the attitudes of the woke elite in America towards racial minorities. Somehow the woke always seem to believe that they know better than the people whose interests they supposedly defend.
Because the prevailing political authoritarian apparatus cannot allow free expression to exist - since the very existence of it could (and will) entail and encourage opposition to its regime. And that cannot stand.
You say that the Chinese mostly want a government responsive to its needs. It stands to reason that presently if they do not get what they want, they'll do what? What they're doing now. Protesting, the courageous ones at least.
You are an apologist for a society that does not and never will give its citizens an avenue through the voting box to exercise its frustrations and yes, grievances. Voting is the very antithesis of censorship. To vote is an act of free expression. It is the open desire of a certain intent. And that scares the hell out of the CCP.
Chinese may not want to live in democratic India or Japan for that matter, but does that preclude any engagement in how they are governed at home?
If these demonstrations do get out of hand, there will be casualties no doubt - whether we here in the West see them or hear about them or not.
They're protesting and the CCP is responding by changing its policies, according to people on the ground there. The social contract is working as expected.
I'd also suggest reading my comments regarding democracy and China. It's very naive to assume that a democratic China would be friendlier to Western interests. In any case the social contract between the Chinese people and their government is for them to negotiate. I'm not advocating for any particular form of governance, only pointing out that Americans fail to realize that there's reasonable overall satisfaction among most Chinese with respect to the competency of their government, Covid lockdowns notwithstanding.
Ironically I don't believe you can say the same for the American government. Isn't Congress one of the least trusted institutions in the country these days?
Do you mean the one by which the CCP encourages a capitalist system allowing Chinese to make money? Lots of it. In return for the abdication of any say in who governs them? How do you know people in mainland China signed on to that?
They love making money, we both can agree to that, let's face it - they are the factory for the rest of the world. But how do we know they also enjoy not being able to participate in how their country works? In how their country is governed? We don't know. Why? Because Chinese are not allowed to speak freely (publicly at least..) to any outside (or inside) journalists.
We may think they are complacent and happy, as I think you do, but only because of their silence.
It’s really ironic you think democracy wouldn’t work in China, because it’s something “western”, that doesn’t fit the Chinese “history and culture”. Too bad that China has been ruled for more than seven decades by a western idea called Communism.
You call this a “social contract”? Abject fear of their regime’s fall is the only factor that sometimes forces the CCP to moderate or at least temporarily change their policies; they couldn’t care less about the interest of the Chinese people. As to the brave Chinese who dared to defy the regime on this occasion, we all know they will end up in the vengeful grinder of the communist mafia.
The very concept of “western style democracy” is an absurdity, a fake promoted by communist propagandists. Democracy simply refers to the people having the final say on electing leaders, taking major decisions and punishing (at the ballot box) the leaders who fail to keep their promises. When Taiwan or S Korea became democracies, they didn’t do so at the request of the “West” or copied “western” mechanisms. They pragmatically adopted democracy because it’s the only way to guarantee the rule of law, and their countries could not continue to develop without this rule of law. Communist China is not an “Eastern-style democracy”, it’s an authoritarian regime on its way to reverting to its totalitarian roots. Tyranny does not know East or West, it’s the same everywhere.
I agree with you, CPC is highly competent is several important areas that matter to ordinary citizens. That is they are very business friendly, not only to big business but also mom and pop shops, education, infrastructure and personal safety (violent crime is very low). This has created situation that every single Chinese lives vastly better than then he lived 10-20-30 years ago. On the other side they crack on personal liberties on every corner. For average Chinese this is great trade off, especially when we look what happened in West in same time period.
At same time US politicians have destroyed middle class, outsourced manufacturing, infrastructure has decayed that now many developing countries have better infrastructure than US. Healthcare not to mention. Cities in US every day look more like lawless cities from SF movies. School system has been degraded on every level. Opioid epidemic is destroying us. Majority of Americans now live worse of than their parents did.
And I am writing this not praise CPC just to point how our US politicians have failed America.
Sadly most people in US don't understand what happened in China and how US politicians have screwed the country, if they did, they would be up in arms. in 1990 China was one of poorest countries in the world. US was manufacturing powerhouse with vibrant middle class and largest trading partner to rest of the world. Today things have turned to be unrecognizable. Chinas middle class is growing, our is shrinking. They manufacture and export for the world. We on the other hand are drowning in debt, with little manufacturing left.
Do you REALLY want to argue that the average American does not live MUCH better than the average Chinese? Have you been to the United States?
And what is wrong with our infrastructure? Nothing, as far as I can see. Shouting about it is a way to get money allocated that is used in corrupt ways.
Yes, America has problems, but the best way of summing them up is if we don't get our act together, we might devolve into something like China.
And the Chinese economy is scarcely doing fantastic. From everything I read, the financial system is more wobbly than ours is. And obviously the lunatic and indefensible measures Xi is imposing on the people of China are hurting your economy a LOT. We do not suffer from this particular burden, and haven't for a year or more. It is true that lockdowns NEVER made any sense, and that we did them anyway, but over time I think that truth will get out to enough people that nothing like that will be politically impossible again--at least if we can figure out how to keep the Democrats from rigging elections.
Nobody is arguing that average Chinese lives better than average American. But that average Chinese has seen their life standard improve immensely for last 30 years, every single Chinese today lives better than he did 10 years ago.
At same time in America, middle class has been decimated, if you compare 1990, 2000 and today, country has taken significant downward trajectory in every single category. In 2000 our national debt was $5 trillion, today we are over $30 trillion with deficits out of control. This would be ok if money was invested in infrastructure and improving things at home. But we have no idea where it went, part of it was squandered in desastrus wars abroad.
Whats is wrong with US infrastructure => honestly where to begin, our infrastructure is terrible, nothing was done since 1980, and when compared to Europe we are 20 years behind, compared to China we are 40 years behind.
Our electric grid is falling, bridges have passed.
American society of civil engineers publishers report card every year
Currently they give us bearly C-. Before coming to China, I also thought US infrastructure is ok, now US looks like developing country.
Again, I am not saying this to praise China, but point out, that our politicians have been sleeping on the job, letting country come to this state.
As for Chinese economy, I work here. True things are not great, but compared to US, China is manufacturing and trading juggernaut, with enormous trade surplus. Things are not ideal, but compared to mismanagement that is going on in US, they are in much better shape. First thing you learn when you come to China, is to stop beliving majority of things written in Western media, because they simply dont align with reality.
Until we start taking our US politicians accountable, things at home will not improve. If people knew, what is really going on in China, and how fast they are catching up, we have uprising in US, because people would see how politicians have faild us
We are well aware how our politicians have failed us, but the Chinese and others seem to be preventing fair elections that would put a better crop in office. Joe Biden takes bribes, and then crafts policy to suit the people who paid them. This is obvious to me at least.
But you are also obviously pushing propaganda, and I seriously doubt many on this forum are ignorant enough to fail to understand that. Yes, Chinese standards of living have risen. But China also operates concentration camps, tortures people at will, and reserves the right as a government to arrest anyone at any time for any reason, and very certainly for publicly saying things they don't want to hear, protesting, or failing to accept life as a de facto slave.
The Chinese have large pictures of a psychopathic mass murderer plastered all over the country. This murderers picture is on the currency. This is shameful.
You fail to understand why Chinese today revere Mao. Mao isn't venerated because of the excesses of the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, which many acknowledge were grave errors, but because he finally managed to unite China after the Century of Humiliation, which saw an aging Qing dynasty succumb to imperialistic depredations by both Japan and the West and which witnessed warlordism and internecine warfare between the KMT and CCP for decades following the collapse of the Qing in 1912. Mao managed to unite modern China in 1949 and after a century of chaos allowed the country to once again become the arbiter of its own destiny.
Given the history of slavery in America and the genocide of the Native Americans and the people associated with those events, I’m a little surprised that you even tried making this argument. The progressive left loves trying to cancel historical figures because they don’t match up to modern 21st century standards of decency. Was Andrew Jackson a psychopath also? He helped perpetuate actual genocide through warfare and slaughter and yet we have him on our $20 bill.
Oh... we in the US completely understand what has happened to the destruction of the working class here. I design and manufacture American OEM durable goods and our competencies cannot be matched by even China with their completely delusional labor rates.
We know that US politicians and their lobbyists offshored our competencies to their benefit - it is why we elected Trump and why THEY got rid of him. Mitch McConnell's wife owns a CCP shipping/shipbuilding business while he completely withdraws all RNC PAC from America First senate candidates that were chosen by the People in their states. The Biden family has taken millions from the Chinese.
Do we need a clearer picture of what our political class is there for?
Excellent commentary. I’m not praising the CCP either, only suggesting that it’s unnuanced to view it as some sort of demonic entity. In any case, the social contract between the Chinese government and its people should be something that they negotiate themselves. I don’t necessarily see it as something for Americans to worry about.
Many commenters seem to believe that competent and functioning government is totally irrelevant as long as individuals attain some abstract notion of freedom and no one can tell them what to do. This mindset strikes me as naïve at best. I don’t see many people here clamoring to live in India and if they did for any extended period of time I'm sure their viewpoint would become far more nuanced.
Chinese Social contract is different than one we have in the west and is based on "Mandate of Heaven" (even atheist and religion-hating CPC claims to have the Mandate of Heaven). This concept is very different from concepts in west. Western Democracy is based on idea that people vote thus provide democratic legitimacy to the government. Western Royalty is based on Idea that Royalty has God given right to rule.
Mandate of Heaven on the other hands proclaims that heaven bestows mandate to just and capable Ruler to rule over China (Be it emperor or CPC or any other government). And as long as ruler is providing for majority people and treats them well, keeps stability. Ruler has right to rule over China. If government mistreats and abused people and not provides, it will lose mandate and people will rise and overthrow them.
It is very interesting concept and explains a lot, why China is the way it is.
When I first came to China, I was same opinion as you, but after learning about mandate of heaven and how it is important for China from historical context, many things become much more clear.
Here is amazing documentary about China and CPC, it has several parts, and brings enemies of CPC and CPC stooges to discuss China and engage in honest discussion, in one of parts they also touch topic of Mandate of Heaven
The whole point of the Constitution--which is the most brilliant political document ever enacted by a major nation in human history in my view--is that we need government. Nobody disputes this. Thomas Paine in Common Sense agreed with this.
He merely said that if we enact a government to protect us and it winds up ABUSING us, then we have the worst of all worlds, don't we? This means the government has to be fenced in, like a wild beast, or raging fire, and used for its appropriate uses, and otherwise forced into background irrelevance as far as most major life decisions are concerned.
Government cannot free anyone. It can prevent one set of individuals from being abused by another. But in China the government is used to ABUSE people who don't like it. I read you have death wagons where organs are harvested from Falun Gong members, for use in the bodies of senior Party members. You have cameras all over the cities of Tibet so that when monks set themselves on fire in protest you can have them off the street in less than five minutes. You gang rape female Tibetan nuns in Chinese jails. Up to a million Uighurs are being treated roughly like the Germans treated the Jews they didn't murder outright.
No, you should feel deep shame trying to rationalize all this. Your government is a model for psychopaths, and no one else.
The cause for the uplifting of millions of Chinese citizens from poverty is not the fact that it was overseen by the CCP, but the fact that the CCP has halfway lifted its heavy boot from the throat of the Chinese people. These days the boot is coming down again, because a truly modern China and rule by the CCP are incompatible (a modern China requires rule of law, not just shiny skyscrapers).
Thanks for the information. Which I both respect and accept except as to Uyghurs. And my solution to that is to not do business with companies that collaborate with China. My concern is not what China does for her citizens. My concern is for China's aspirations, if any, in the rest of the world.
You can stop with the hyperbole, Raziel. No one on the continent of North America during our time of temporary lockdowns was ever forced to stay in their apartments either chained in or with doors welded shut.
I do not think we can ever be compared to the dystopia now taking place ( and apparently has been for over a year) in certain Chinese cities, where an overzealous authoritarian regime is herding citizens into what literally are home internment camps.
Raziel, thank God you are still with us (in this comments family). I was wondering where you were. Thank you for your frontline reporting. Wow you are so correct. Eye-opening.
I see the supply issues in the US as something which must be severely impacting China. The people who were producing these products must not be working today. Are they starving? I fear the worst. I hope you can reassure me that this is just civil unrest and not some horrific genocide happening in your nation.
You can live in Beijing and still not get the full picture because you don’t belong there - just a foreigner. When you have at least some people going from specific protest demands to openly shouting against the communist government, in an authoritarian regime you’ve gone over a critical threshold. You need to be born in this and absorb it every day to understand what it really means.
Raziel. I would love to hear more about what is really happening there and write about it on my Substack. You have made some very interesting points. Stay well
When you compare the bravery of the citizens of China and Iran to the “resist” Blueanon crowd in the US, the contrast is striking.
I used to manage a team in China and travel there a few times a year. One guy on my team, in particular, was very western. He LOVED the US and especially, the NBA (I got to take him to a Celtics game when he came over to the states which was awesome).
When he was in the states or we were on calls together (not on WeChat mind you), we would discuss politics, what was happening in Hong Kong at the time, etc. But, on a trip to China, we were getting coffee one afternoon, and I brought up a topic we had discussed many times before...around the difference between the expectations of Americans to have a government that respects individual liberty vs. the Chinese expectations of a strongman leader, and he got VERY uncomfortable. Later he asked me to not bring up those discussions in public when I’m in China because you never know who’s listening.
I was really taken aback. It was one of those small moments that makes you appreciative to be an American; that I never have to worry about who is listening over my shoulder (other than for the fear of liberal schoolmarms, to wag their finger at me).
Praying for the Chinese people, and hope that at the very least American companies (looking at you, Apple and Google), can stay out of the way and not aid the Chinese government in their repression.
Yes -- and to add to that, even in an American classroom, a Chinese student who says something negative about the CCP will disappear. I have seen this happen a few times.
You missed the news. China has secret police offices around the US. Probably using many other methods than passive receipt of informer statements. Active bugging, plants, etc.
No. It did not happen. You do not teach Chinese students. You are not in education, in any way shape or form. You have never taught a Chinese student that was in class on Monday, then was "disappeared" on Wednesday.
1. You claimed Chinese students in American schools, who criticize the CCP, "disappear."
2. You also claimed to have see/experienced this yourself.
Well....
The only "Chinese students in American schools" you could be referring to are either undergrad college students or graduate students at the various institutions in the U.S..
However....
YOU are not in academia and have ZERO interaction with undergrad/graduate international students, Chinese or otherwise.
So, you are a liar.....or maybe you can share with the class more details re: you claim?
I had to learn the lesson from a Russian man in Costa Rica. Not good if the government caught wind that you're not happy with lockdown business closures.
When you compare what real loss/aabsence of freedoms in China and Iran is like to the Qanon/MAGA crowd idea of "loss of freedom," the contrast is striking.
I still don’t understand the fear attached to Qanon but not attached to the lefts favorite go-to conspiracy validation; “unnamed sources close to the investigation?”
Both are anonymous but one is stigmatized the other embraced like some kind of gold standard.
Q Anon people are recovering socialists with a mix of former religious people who are now atheists looking for a human savior. They are still practicing socialists pretending to be rebels. They are still waiting on a great reset and a check in the mail for $100,000.00. They insist that there are secret military tribunals and executions happening behind the scenes. They are still socialists. Are they planted to make Republicans look like fools? Maybe not, but in my opinion they are the far left wing of the party and need to be identified as such.
Sigh. I heard from my pool guy that he had a friend who heard from another friend and then Hank Johnson dropped his “Guam Tipping” studies so he could investigate!
So how much freedom do you have to lose before it’s ok to protest? Or does the government get to decide that too? Just making sure I know for next time.
and yet we were told that "fiery but mostly peaceful protests" were perfectly fine and not violent. The bottom line is a protest is protected speech regardless of whether you agree with it.
and let me ask you, if you had one apple that you worked your entire life to grow, maybe it was all you had, and then it was burned to a crisp or mashed up to into apple sauce (in violation of existing destruction of property and trespassing laws), would you give a flying f*** about the other 10,099 apples, or why the burner/masher/destroyer thought it was okay to do that to your apple?
The CCP and the desires of the Blueanon crowd have much in common. All you have to do is listen to the unhinged rants of Hillary Clinton of late to see the authoritarian desires of both.
I’m hopeful but I question many leaders in the West’s true resolve. We saw they were perfectly happy to squelch protestors in their own country (Canada and Australia for example) using methods the CCP would have been proud to call their own. As a result, any vocal support from many of these clowns will be nothing but empty virtue.
I have seen many people comparing Trudeau's "well of course the people of China should be able to protest" with his own behavior toward Canadian citizens who were protesting.
Same. It truly is hypocritical. Especially considering he froze bank accounts and took away protestor funds on go fund me. How is that not at the level of the CCP??
But Celia, those protests were directed at him and therefore were unacceptable. And at least one of the protestors was, or was pretending to be, a Nazi and some were even, heaven forbid, Republicans and people who weren’t demanding that Trump be arrested. And other protestors watch FOX NEWS rather than the State-Approved and patriotic CBC
We see the same thing happening in Iran, with young people rising up and saying "No!"
Unfortunately, leaders in the West--and particularly the current leaders of the federal government of the U.S.--are more sympathetic to the leaders of authoritarian regimes like China and Iran than they are to the protestors. Oh, there are some tacit comments about people's right to protest; meanwhile, international deals are still being struck with the dictators crushing the protestors.
The sad reality is that these particular governments WILL NOT STOP murdering their own citizens. No one on the global stage has the will to make them stop or even think twice.
Two phrases came to mind as I read your spot on comment. Might Makes Right and Never Again. Always easy to make courageous proclamations far from the violence. History makes clear that good intentions and desires have a hard time standing up to real power held by ruthless people. Whether the people of Iran or China will prevail is far from certain at this point. Just as was the case 245 years ago when the redcoats were coming.
Do Americans have the courage of Col. Parker and his men on Lexington Green that cold April morning when they faced down the armed might of the British Empire? Based on the servile and cowardly response to the pandemic, I'm afraid we know the answer.
I’m old enough to remember the world protesting the imprisonment of Mandela who, if viewed through the prism of the above had, after all, broken the laws of S Africa!
Memories these days are frowned upon as you know. History that does not fit the narrative of the anointed must be memory holed. Guys like Kerry cannot be shamed when it comes to the gross hypocrisy. It is in their DNA
Like Bari Weiss's interview with Benjamin Netanyahu, this is a very powerful article and report by a courageous, experienced and well informed journalist.
To me, this is the kind of journalism that we used to see in the Wall Street Journal, NY Times and WaPo, but they all have so many commercial conflicts of interest that we don't see this kind of reporting much anymore.
CNBC's and the NY Time's Andrew Ross Sorkin's interview yesterday with Sam Bankman-Fried about his FTX catastrophe was just as gripping and impressive.
As a reader and viewer, I don't know enough to fact check anyone. That is why I read and watch so many versions and recaps of important stories on web sites like Common Sense, TheDispatch.com, wsj.com, Seekingalpha.com and WaPo.
After you do your homework, you can jump to some conclusions, but you do it with humility because you know that in a few minutes new information will become available that may change your view of things.
Some stories, like China's, are not new. They're just more of the same depressing reports about how power-greedy people are so willing to destroy and take other people's lives on their ways to political power.
No greed is worse than the greed for political power.
"CNBC's and the NY Time's Andrew Ross Sorkin's interview yesterday with Sam Bankman-Fried about his FTX catastrophe was just as gripping and impressive."
How about fawning and repellent? He was interviewing a latter day Madoff. Sorkin is a reptile. The crowd was worse.
Interviews like that serve to give legitimacy to criminals like SBF. It's publicity to say hey, he's not a bad guy like those dirty Trumpers. He just made a few mistakes with other people's money on his path to effective altruism!
Exactly right. I was thinking the same thing after reading Donald E.L. Johnson's post on SBF interview. SBF should be charged with criminal misconduct. He robbed Peter to pay Paul. He went and spent millions on his lifestyle and bought a massive mansion in the Bahamas that he put in his parents name. Even suggesting maybe he's a "lousy businessman" is absurd. He knew exactly what he was doing. As for altruism, any "billionaire" can pledge to give their wealth away. That doesn't mean squat. All they do is park it in a DAF fund and enjoy tax benefits. Bill Gates is a master at that.
As a retired business and markets journalist and publisher and as a speculator who doesn't own or trade crypto currencies, I thought Sorkin asked well informed, probing, tough and even skeptical questions. I don't think they were fawning.
As for SBF, he struck me as a very intelligent guy. He got himself into a business he couldn't control or manage, and he made a lot of strategic, tactical and critical managerial mistakes. He obviously has a wonderful memory, but smart people do a lot of dumb things. Often they get away with their mistakes and misdeeds and recover from them.
SBF isn't getting away with anything. Whether and how he'll recover won't be known for years or even decades, if ever.
Is he a con man? Is he just a lousy businessman? Is he a fool? A lot of smart, wise people seem to think he is all of the above. For me, it's too early to really know.
I don't think the interview gave SBF legitimacy. Nothing can or will. I think the interview will help speculators learn that when there is no there there, don't get sucked in.
Are the lockdowns really about covid? Or are they a way to minimize the rioting? The Chinese people have a lot to be angry about other than the covid policy. They lost their money buying apartments that never existed, there aren’t enough women to marry the men, and they are being watched wherever they go, whatever they do. And now they have Mao 2.0 for life.
Once the totalitarians gain control, it's extraordinarily difficult to remove them. But not impossible.
Yet there are always quislings, looking to bend to the power of the state. We saw them in full bloom during our pandemic. Willing to sacrifice liberty for the illusion of safety. Swallowing and repeating the lies of those in power. That the vaccines worked and were safe. They clearly don't and they aren't. That lockdowns work. They don't. And the damage - physical, psychological and economic are staggering. That masks are essential. They aren't. They are marks of nothing but abject fear and obeisance (driving masked and alone????) And that moral and good people would accede to the trashing of the Bill of Rights and accept vaccine mandates. Or craziest of all, that Jesus would want you to take the jab.
Our own totalitarian liars are different from the Chinese tyrants only in degree, not in inclination.
The fate of the Ceausescus should be the fate of all tyrants.
I have no sympathy for people who oppose one totalitarian ideology while embracing another. What do the Uyghurs expect from a government that knows how totalitarianism works?
In addition, I am more concerned with the domestic power exercised by Chairman Biden than President Xi as, closer to home, Midshipmen are denied graduation by the USNA because they refuse to take a rushed, experimental “vaccine” that doesn’t work and poses known and yet denied health risks in the short term and unknown health risks in the long term.
DOWN WITH BIDEN AND TRUDEAU AND THEIR BLOODY, BLOOD-CLOT-PRODUCING, REGIMES
We want to “renegotiate” too. Free, fair, and transparent elections. Election Day, not election months. NO BALLOT HARVESTING. No state supported racism. Equality under the law.
The only thing that really matters is control of the army. No revolution or major change can take place in China while the army is totally under the control of the party.
Probably, but I doubt the army can do it alone. It’s easy to intimidate unarmed people if you have guns. But who do you intimidate? For that, you need informers. Playing whack-a-mole only works for the moles that appear. Most won’t, but in their hearts, they’re not playing on Team CCP. How to find them? In revolutionary Russia and France, everyone spied on everyone. If the dynamic of the Chinese version works the same way, the ratio of rebels to rats will run close to 50/50.
That’s plainly unstable: either the rebels will win and there will be a real cultural revolution, or the repression will escalate and blood will run in the streets. I’m not betting on either side in this one. Too close to call.
At some point many in the army will refuse to attack and kill their fellow citizens. It may take longer in China since the respect for life is so much less than in the West, but it can happen.
It's said that in 1989 local Beijing based units were first deployed and refused orders to fire on the crowds, but they brought in units from a distant province in the West and told them the protestors were terrorists and anti-China and...you know the rest.
Somewhat related to this in the spirit of information flow and the fact that all of us are finally understanding things outside of our bubbles: SEVEN THOUSAND PEDOPHILES are being released in the state of California.
The people releasing these cretins are pro-criminal DEMOCRATS and these pedophiles will be coming to a state near you.
There are links to support this, but do not want to clog Bari's comment section with hyperlink issues.
I can see R T and compro buying a bus ticket to California right now. After all they not only support their fellow Dems, they fawn over them, praise them and vote for them. Their motto is "Vote early and vote often."
Fascinating: none of the coverage I’ve read so far made the explicit connection that The Urumqi fire specifically affected Uyghurs. Granted, some mentioned the region and I could have inferred this. My geography is not as solid as it might be and I didn’t make the connection.
It sometimes feels too easy to project our own desires and cultural assumptions onto other peoples. No doubt there are those young Chinese who yearn for a Western-style freedom; but let’s not jump to conclusions about what the Chinese people want.
Hopefully the Chi-Comms don’t invade Taiwan as a way to divert attention from their domestic problems.
I think the world would be a much better place without the regimes currently running China and Iran, but I think we should be prepared for the violence that usually follows regime changes.
Interesting parallel in that the CCP is going to extremes to "eradicate a virus" while on the other side of the world, a certain faction is going to extremes to "eradicate "racism."" Both result in censorship and incarceration, be it literal or figurative.
The following quote assumes that locking people indoors and other extreme measures are the cause of a lower COVID death rate in China. Actually, the cause of a lower COVID death rate in China is that the death rate is less than 1% and all of these measures are pure folly. Add to this that one cannot eradicate a virus anyway.
FOLLY. On both sides of the world. FOLLY.
"True, the country has seen relatively few Covid deaths, but it has come at a steep price: to keep people inside, the authorities have, in many cases, welded apartment doors shut or locked them with chains."
Unfortunately these protests will be snuffed out like Tiananmen, Hong Kong, and Jimmy Lai. American corporations could make a difference but are too reliant on China and therefore, cowardly. People like Steve Kerr and Mark Cuban are enablers and justify their involvement by saying “the U.S. isn’t perfect either”
I live in China, Beijing to be exact. I believe that western media is again not really reporting what is happening here.
People here are not protesting for democracy, but for easing of lockdowns. That several people are shouting "We want democracy" means absolutly nothing, this is enormous country with 4.5 Population of US. You can find people yelling "We want emperor back". Majority people are pissed, because they follow world cup and see that nobody is wearing mask. For example on protest in Beijing they were shouting that they are patriots, and want lockdowns to end.
As for protest, what I was surprised, is how fast have they worked. In less than week, they have starting easing measures. Guangzhou (big city in south) has removed all measures.
In West people were literally called Nazis, conspiracy theorist, anti science for over a year when they were fighting lockdowns. DeSantis was called crazy for opening Florida. Gavin Newsome in Commiefornia was decimating small business with lockdowns. In Europe (continent where I was born) protestors were beaten by the police. Australia had interment camps. Canada and their truckers not to mention (who were called white supremacist for wanting easier Covid measures).
I am not saying this to show how China is good, but how bad thing are in US. Government and MSM were absolutly out of control for 2 years, any descent was punished to same level as CPC is doing in China. Only ironically their protest actualy worked, and in US you still have idiots doing double masking an Dr Fauci is waking free man.
Only if you live in Beijing can you tell the rest of us what’s happening there. I agree with everything you said about the USA and Canada. What we went through in the USA the last almost three years is unforgivable. Democrat politicians and media are fully to blame as they blocked our ability to have the freedoms that we expect. They loved seeing the fighting and division going on and counted it as a win for them. The doctors that were silenced by them are the ones who science has proven to be correct. Meanwhile Fauci, on his farewell media tour, is still talking about masks and school closures depending on viral load in local area. And now, because of all those mentioned, along with the head of the largest teachers union and the CDC, we’re stuck with the disaster our country has turned into.
It's like the Chinese are protesting for more freedoms while the Americans protest for fewer freedoms. What a world.
No one in the US is protesting for less freedom, at least not ordinary people. Normal mechanisms of political response have broken down, and the people have lost collective control over basic policies and how their government functions. A once-free media is complicit.
We no longer have functioning, representative parties and instead look to personality cults to save us. Trump fits into this pattern, but the pattern started in 2008 with Obama.
Agreed, we're not actually protesting for freedom so much as voting our freedoms away and attacking anyone who won't.
I think the protests after the Dobbs decision is an example of this, considering how the states gained more power due to the striking down of Rowe.
That is nonsense. The SC gave the authority to the states for the "people" in the states to decide. The states, and people in the states, "get back" the power rightly belong to them. That is the full meaning of the SC striking down of Rowe. It was wrongly decided and unconstitutional.
Just a quick correction. It’s Roe (as in John Doe), not Rowe. Roe of course was the “identity” of the plaintiff for privacy purposes.
Yes. The oppression and lack of freedom in America is stifling. Worse than China.
Bullshit
Comprof is a troll, please don't feed the trolls. That account leaves divisive and insulting comments on every article. It's always to elicit a reaction and an argument, never productive or even respectful on a basic level.
Not a troll at all. Just someone who is concerned about all the freedoms that have been taken away from Americans. I feel....like I live in E. Germany in 80s.
No. I had to wear a mask going to the grocery store and on a plane. My kid took online classes/Zoom classes last year. Unacceptable.
Twitter won't let everyone participate. I have a Constitutional right to free speech
We are losing all our freedoms in America.
Twitter is a private company. You don't have a constitutional right to use twitter. Free speech means free from government interference. As in men with guns won't come to your house, arrest you and/or beat the crap out of you.
In China people from the government will arrest you and beat you up for complaining about the government. Here in the US you obviously feel free to post here without that fear.
There's no comparison.
Don't confuse a right to speak with a right to be heard.
Always want what you don’t have.
Sorry, that is pure nonsense. Americans do NOT protest for fewer freedom.
"Democrat politicians and media are fully to blame"
No. If politicians were really to blame they would have been tossed 3 weeks ago. Instead, the vast majority of them retained their thrones. Newsome, Whitmer, Pritzker, Hochul, et el, and dozens of Congressmen were all given a thumbs up by their constituents.
The people are to blame so it will happen again.
Those who didn't vote, allowed those who did vote to control the narrative. The 40% of conservatives who didn't bother to vote could have swung the election massively in favor of a pro-freedom, anti-socialism agenda.
Right... so they didn't much care about that 2 years of treatment. Can't blame a politician when he/she's just doing the bidding of those who vote for them.
I would argue that the politicians are not doing the bidding for their constituents, but rather for themselves, the special interests, and the squeakiest wheels. I do blame the voters, but I also blame the politicians (on both sides of the aisle) for their greediness, lack of integrity, and failure to do what is right for their constituents and our nation.
But Terry why would 40% of conservatives not vote.I just don’t believe that
I don't know, but I read the other day that 55% of Republicans voted (actually, a higher number than Democrats this cycle). That leaves a lot of potential voters sitting out.
Hmmm.....maybe might have to do with someone telling everyone that U.S. Elections are completely fraudulent unless he, or the GOP wins?
Or maybe someone in AZ, telling "McCain Republicans" to "get the hell out." of her rally/campaign?
This is what infuriates me. Those who endlessly complain about how things are, but did not vote, nor act in any way to make real change; these people make me want to censor them.
It was the perfect opportunity for them to go against what Trump had wanted, and I’m no fan of Trump. Once the economy was shut down, it was a full road ahead for them to do what they did. I had to laugh at the comments I saw for two years…”Thank you, Gov Whitmer, for keeping us safe.” Uhh…you couldn’t keep yourself safe? I sure knew how! And the main reason why she won was bc of the Roe overturn. But I will partially agree…there are some very successful but stupid liberals who fell for her so-called Covid protection.
Lol. Dumb ho. Couldn't stop people from trying to kidnap her.
I thought overturning Roe would be super popular. I was shocked.
I agree and have said so in former posts, that Californians must love tip toeing around feces because they reelect the same hard left idiots.
YIP - It’s almost like Bari keeps writing the same b/s different article or interview.
You don't live in CA.
I’m not sure I think the Democrats have got a stranglehold on the elections, they don’t care how they win them as long as they retain the power. Take Arizona for eg the same voting system as 2020 and the same county Maricopa as having the most problems. Going forward to 2024 I doubt very much will change. I’m sure by then we will probably be voting on Fakebook or MSM it’s a terrifying thought both ways.
If you have a few minutes, visit my Substack article titled "Doubt Relief" and tell me what you think. I'm seeking opinions on an idea.
Yeah.....can't believe they were ok with their kids being screamed at all day in school about how they're oppressors and watching their daughter's soccer team being taken over by trans kids.
Where is the ever senile Joe on all of this. He hasn't condemned China for its brutality. He did not condemn Cuba for brutally breaking up protests. He hasn't condemned Iran for murdering women and killing protestors.
I believe the latest revaluations on Hunter's laptop prove the ever senile joe is in the pockets of China. Could he also be the pockets of Cuba and Iran?
I doubt Cuba. They are broke. Maybe Joe just agrees with dictatorial regimes and won't condemn them. After all he tries to rule by mandate.
Because Joe is right in line with Xi and his communists.
Yeah....and what "revaluations"....were those exactly.....
And to think Linda with “our free and fair election system” we voted for this twice 2020 and 2022. It beggars belief at times and this is America, it’s becoming rather unsettling to watch how this is unfolding. I agree the Democrats and the media are fully to blame for our story. My family are wondering how this is all going to end, I’m really nervous to say to them not well unfortunately
No, it's not the Dems and the media. It's weak uninspiring leadership (really the bereft leadership) of the RNC. There are so many things they could have done with aggressive truthful ads about the Dems. Joe, Hunter, AOC and her squad of radical antisemites/communists.
Ads saying don't turn our state into California, showing homeless defecating on the street, shooting up drugs and the government sanctioned lawlessness, no bail, not enforcing shoplifting laws, releasing thousands of pedophiles from prison I could go on and on. The RNC are wusses.
It wasn't the media that sunk the GOP, it was spinelessness.
The way you put it I think I’m leaving America, to go where I have no clue.
I have thought of the Channel Isles, like Jersey or Guernsey. Switzerland is too expensive.
I can't believe AOC met with Nick Fuentes and Kanye. Sad.
That Hunter Biden laptop is totally like a major something.
Can't believe the GOP, who gets their asses handed to them, in every popular vote count for every POTUS election isn't super popular.
Yeah....you're at a 10....need you at about a 4.
Not sure, Linda.
February 2020 through to the end of that year Trump was in charge and allowed many of the lockdowns you blame on somebody else. The fighting and division - I think it suited him too, as he backtracked on the health measures he initially supported.
To his credit (not that you might think so) he had also the temerity to fast track a vaccine (imagine that!) that was available more or less by the end of the year.
You want to spread blame, go right ahead. Just include everybody..
Stop, Lee.
Please....for the love of God....don't bring up all the "Red State"/GOP Governors, etc. who imposed lockdowns, etc.
You're being too factually accurate/reasonable for this board.
You are a Communist, woke, leftists.
Michigan was locked down quite strictly. Believe me, I blame republicans for plenty!
Did you get welded into your house?
Well....make sure you mention Republicans, too. I know this is a MAGA board, but let's at least try and have the pretense of intellectual honesty.
Though they weren't mentioned in your post.
I came here to say the same and you said it better. This article is overly sensationalized. I was in Beijing in 1989. Today's protests are in different nature, organization (thanks Apple for working with the CCP), and scale.
Btw, they didn't loosen up in Guangzhou. They said they would, but when you ask people who actually live there, they didn't, just like they supposedly loosened up in Beijing - they didn't.
Finally, I wanted to point out that today's democratic party is closer to the CCP than you would imagine. I hope American voters are warned watching what's unfolding in China.
That's an odd thing to say. The Nazi's were explicitly a national socialist party and the fascists in Italy were an offshoot of Italian socialists (Mussolini get kicked out of the party so he started a new one).
Two of them succeeded.
The pedophile Joe Biden probably bought a dozen of these purses.
What does an ad campaign by a private company trying (and failing) to be edgy have to do with politics?
Ask the NYT.
Thanks for the observations. I believe the author's unwritten point is that demonstrations about the lockdowns and deaths can easily spark a much broader movement of resistance to the CCP. Maybe that's wishful thinking, but it does have precedent in other places.
I disagree that these protest will change anything, for simple reason in 2-3 months nobody will care and people will forget and go eitj their own lifes.
Cuomo & Democrats have send god knows how many people to their deaths to nursing homes in New York.
Did we see major shift in political spectrum in New York?
In Canada Trudeau was doing stuff that would make CPC blush, did we see major change was he voted out?
Gavin Newsom destroyed countless lifes in California, did he got recalled?
In all 3 cases there was desent, but no change in government (Cuomo had to resign for being sexual predator). In California and New York majority of voters voted like sheep to keep current regime.
Fauci lied for 3 years, everyone know it, trough his policie he destroyed countless lifes, and still majority of democrats treat him like hero (jist shows how powerful MSM brainwash on average democrat is)
These protest will die down very soon, because majority of people will forget and simply wont care, as soon as measures are eased
"Fauci lied for 3 years, everyone know it, trough his policie he destroyed countless lifes, and still majority of democrats treat him like hero..."
Fauci is a hero to the left because he demonstrated and applied POWER. He held the nation under his thumb with a combination of pseudo-science, celebrity worship and moral certitude amplified by 24/7 media hagiography. He slinks into history - his reputation destroyed by the facts.
And the ever senile Joe issued mandates, not law, mandates. Isn't that what dictators do?
Brilliant and succinct. Need to put this away for future use
Thanks for commenting, Raziel. Only Tucker via the Daily Mail is covering this that I can find; he is showing the video of tanks reminiscent of 1989. I remember seeing my counterpart guarding a minefield on his side of the fence in the same year. Pay attention, people.
Of course people are protesting for democracy. It’s human nature to yearn for freedom. But those sufficiently informed of what democracy means know that full-on democracy is a pipe dream at this stage, so they’re trying for a tiny slice of that pie, i.e., the freedom to walk the streets and voice their opinions. The relaxing of lockdowns is a step in that direction.
I agree with you about the lunacy of lockdowns imposed by politicians in US and Canada (you can add New Zealand and Australia to that shameful list). They were rooted in perverse medical advice, which gave cover to the power-mad politicians and bureaucrats, of whom Dr. Fauci was most conspicuous.
How do we correct this now especially with an administration hell bent on keeping us restricted. We need to focus on getting all our students back in school without masks our population back to work, the focus from the Democrats and the MSM is everywhere else’s the moment.
That to me reads like propaganda. The lockdowns would not be so draconian if the population was armed, or if elections mattered. You cannot separate what the government does from what it is allowed to do.
And yes, a lot of stupid and indefensible things happened in supposedly democratic nations. But those were examples of unregulated authoritarianism, were they not, and not of the systems as they should have operated, on a basis of REAL science and the consent of the governed?
Kishore Mahbubani argues that most Chinese rate the CCP as highly competent. There were certainly frustrations with the draconian lockdowns, but as Raziel notes this isn't a mass protest movement agitating for democracy. In fact, I see little evidence that there’s a desire for Western style democracy on a mass scale in China today.
The irony is that most Chinese find the CCP to be reasonably competent, though of course certainly not perfect. On the other hand, Americans are the ones who are primarily advocating for the overthrow of the CCP and denigrating the brutality of Chinese governance. The disconnect reminds me of how liberal elites generally have a softer view towards crime than actual members of the Black community, many of whom live in high crime neighborhoods and have to deal with the consequences of rampant criminality daily.
As is now being reported, major cities are now shifting their lockdown policies in response to the protests. The Chinese government has generally shown a tendency to be responsive to the needs of the people. Post-Mao, the CCP has overseen the greatest uplifting of its citizens out of poverty in human history. This doesn't align with the picture of a vicious regime that only cares about its own survival at the expense of everything else. I believe it's more accurate to describe the CCP as paternalistic rather than despotic.
So you work for the Chinese security and propaganda apparatus? I get it.
You know, Mao killed some 50 million Chinese through sheer incompetence, combined with a sociopathic indifference to their suffering. He also led an inter-generational mass murder of wise and decent human beings, in the name of an abstraction which mostly involved a narcissistic desire to promote himself and his agenda. Yet his picture is everywhere.
And even now the Uighurs would dispute the humaneness of the CCP. So would those in Hong Kong. So would the Falun Gong. So would ANYONE who fails to mouth the ridiculous lies that Communists force their prey to mouth everywhere they seize dictatorial power.
You may be right that they don't want American style democracy. But they don't want Xi for life, and they don't want social credit scores to determine the course of their own and their childrens lives. Only genuinely sick people defend this abusive and horrific regime.
And the prosperity only dates to the early 90's, when free market forces were eventually allowed to work relatively unimpeded. Communism was an absolute disaster in every possible way, and the CCP should now be renamed the Fascist Party of China. That is what it is. There is no Communism. There is an oligarchy which seeks its own wealth and privilege backed by a powerful internal military trained to beat, arrest, torture and murder dissidents who refuse to be silenced by the usual method of the social credit score and threats.
At the risk of coming across as repetitive, data suggests that most Chinese view the CCP as highly competent. The recent protests against the lockdowns are more of an aberration than the norm for CCP rule post-Mao. And in this case it seems as if many cities are already starting to recalibrate Covid policies in response to the protests, which is suggestive of a government attuned to the needs of its people. The CCP may overtly crack down in many cases in order to maintain public order but it usually adjusts its policies behind the scenes in response to the needs of the people.
Mao is revered today not because of the excesses of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which many admit were grave errors, but because he finally managed to unite China in 1949 after the Century of Humiliation. The aging and decrepit Qing dynasty collapsed in 1912 after decades of increasing incompetence, with depredations inflicted on China by both Japan and the West. China went through periods of warlordism and internecine warfare between the KMT and the CCP in the ensuing decades. It wasn't until 1949 that modern China was finally unified again as a country in control of it own destiny.
Then and now, Chiang Kai Shek would have been a VASTLY better leader of China. Wherever you are now economically, you would have been there 60 years ago.
And you know, Saddam Hussein regularly polled quite well too. Nobody publicly opposed him. Everyone publicly loved him.
And the simple reason was that anyone who complained disappeared, and it was well known most of them were tortured and killed in a variety of ways. China operates to this day Gulags which are called Laogai. You know this. Don't act like you don't.
Please don't treat us as if we are stupid. Many Americans are, which is why your propaganda has ANY chance, but by and large not here. What you need are people who know nothing about anything.
Chiang Kai-shek ruled over Taiwan as the head of an authoritarian military regime that perpetrated the White Terror. Martial law wasn't ended until 1987 by his son Chiang Ching-kuo. The first democratic presidential election in Taiwan wasn't held until 1996.
Towards the latter stages of the Chinese Civil War, the American political establishment became increasingly dillusioned with Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT, in particular over the KMT's perceived corruption and incompetence.
Comparing China today to Iraq under Saddam Hussein is asinine.
Formosa then Taiwan lived in perennial fear both of a Communist Chinese invasion, and of subversion from within by agents the lunatic Communists no doubt cultivated and where possible inserted. It was not without reason they feared that the brutal Red Chinese would do to them what they did to the Tibetans.
And despite all this, Chiang Kai Shek and the KMT were VASTLY, VASTLY less violent than the Communists. As you KNOW, Mao more or less forced most of the nation into an extended period of mass starvation, and most scholars estimate some 50 million Chinese died as a direct result. And the White Terror killed perhaps 18,000 people, probably most of them guilty.
The Cultural Revolution killed AT LEAST hundreds of thousands of people.
Here is the thing: you cannot be an honest Communist. That beast does not exist. What Communists do is break things and then lie about it. Here, you act as if you are in a position to be morally outraged about the actions CKS and the KMT undertook to prevent being overtaken by Communists, but ALSO free to ignore ENTIRELY the vastly larger crimes of the criminal regime you are even now defending.
And what is asinine about comparing the Fascistic government of China--where a small elite has grown immensely rich using the power of the State to compel what in millions of cases amounts to literal slavery--to Iraq? I think China is WORSE than Iraq in its worst days.
You tell me: what happens to people who criticize the regime publicly? Are they given a fair hearing? Nonsense. Depending on who they are, they either disappear, are publicly rebuked, risk retalIation against their families (EVEN OVERSEAS!!), and at a MINIMUM see their social credit score lowered, and access to basic human rights curtailed.
No, you are defending a brutal regime that is comparable to the worst of Franco or Mussolini, wit the difference that you are vastly more violent, much less tolerant, and utterly unable to EVER speak a word of honest truth.
So who controls that data?
They must retain some pride as a nation. If they lose that they will collapse. It's a real tightrope act criticizing your government while maintaining a semblance of national pride. We are having the same problem here, where patriotic acts are labeled as "insurrection".
If we do recover and finally humble the purveyors of socialism, will those dedicated to it ever recover their pride, or will they assume that their nation has failed?
Socialism is mostly driven by ignorance and thoughtlessness. Our nations honest history withstands scrutiny well. We have done many bad things and have had many flaws, but I would happily compare our worst moments with the average moments of most other nations.
So, assuming that recovery somehow consists in surmounting the propaganda apparatus through accurate information, and the stimulation of honest independent thought, I would say no. All tolerably intelligent people will realize we did them a favor.
And "patriotism as insurrection" obviously is a stupid idea that was crafted to make traps for fools. It has worked in many cases, but if and when we get full disclosure on FBI, Capital Police and other involvement, it will be untenable for all but the most psychotic.
After having been there a few times you make a good point about the people there being ambivalent about communism because their point of reference is... state provided everything with a slice of caplitalism to keep people quiet(communism). What makes me far more nervous about world stability is that Western 'elites' are favorable to the Chinese model. Tim Cook of Apple just admitted such. I mean, that is an American company praising communism. Very unsettling for those of us who have lived communism or near it.
Obviously, Tim Cook has zero intention of living by the rules he thinks should apply to the rest of us. "Communism", per say, is just a means of reviving oligarchic elitism and class hierarchy using language that still appears to conform to Liberal standards. All the language is lies, of course. Tim Cook is a liar, a thief, and a bully. This is all latent in his abdication of the most basic principles of human decency.
I don't like Alex Jones. I can't watch him. But he and people like him have been talking for a long time about this global class of people who want a global government of us, by them, for them. And we now know that is pretty much exactly what the World Economic Forum is. They have gotten open about it, not least because their propaganda has made so many people so stupid that they can say things that would have infuriated everyone in the US, across the spectrum, just 30 years ago.
Agree, brother. Alex Jones... Don't care for his schtick, but he was right. So was Trump who did everything he could to put a stop to the 'Great Reset' and they took him out for it. They are still trying to.
Really, Yan? Paternalistic?
Like a father ruling over his sometimes wayward children? As in censoring what they read and what they see? As in no right to free assembly if it is against the regime? As in no elections in deciding who will govern them? As in no right to write and publish freely? As in no right to criticize the government in print or online? As in no right to organize a political party to oppose the regime in power?
You are writing on a thread that would not exist in China, for Chinese.
You might want to keep that in mind..
Censorship and democracy are two different things. Personally I'm against the CCP's censorship but there's little to suggest that masses of Chinese people want Western style democracy. In any case, there are myriad ways to get around the censors in China. Oftentimes it's more of an inconvenience than anything else.
Japan is often held up as an erstwhile democratic ally, but apart from 1993-1994 and 2009-2012, the LDP has been in power continuously since 1955. Japan is virtually a one party state. No one in China is clamoring to live in democratic India. What Chinese people mostly want is for a government more responsive to its needs. The recent shift in Covid policy suggests that the Chinese government is recalibrating in response to the protests. For a supposedly despotic regime, the CCP post-Mao seems surprisingly attuned to the needs of its people.
I hate repeating myself but the attitude of many commenters here eerily mirrors the attitudes of the woke elite in America towards racial minorities. Somehow the woke always seem to believe that they know better than the people whose interests they supposedly defend.
Censorship exists in China why?
Because the prevailing political authoritarian apparatus cannot allow free expression to exist - since the very existence of it could (and will) entail and encourage opposition to its regime. And that cannot stand.
You say that the Chinese mostly want a government responsive to its needs. It stands to reason that presently if they do not get what they want, they'll do what? What they're doing now. Protesting, the courageous ones at least.
You are an apologist for a society that does not and never will give its citizens an avenue through the voting box to exercise its frustrations and yes, grievances. Voting is the very antithesis of censorship. To vote is an act of free expression. It is the open desire of a certain intent. And that scares the hell out of the CCP.
Chinese may not want to live in democratic India or Japan for that matter, but does that preclude any engagement in how they are governed at home?
If these demonstrations do get out of hand, there will be casualties no doubt - whether we here in the West see them or hear about them or not.
And we are not woke when we condemn that.
They're protesting and the CCP is responding by changing its policies, according to people on the ground there. The social contract is working as expected.
I'd also suggest reading my comments regarding democracy and China. It's very naive to assume that a democratic China would be friendlier to Western interests. In any case the social contract between the Chinese people and their government is for them to negotiate. I'm not advocating for any particular form of governance, only pointing out that Americans fail to realize that there's reasonable overall satisfaction among most Chinese with respect to the competency of their government, Covid lockdowns notwithstanding.
Ironically I don't believe you can say the same for the American government. Isn't Congress one of the least trusted institutions in the country these days?
What social contract are you referring to, Yan?
Do you mean the one by which the CCP encourages a capitalist system allowing Chinese to make money? Lots of it. In return for the abdication of any say in who governs them? How do you know people in mainland China signed on to that?
They love making money, we both can agree to that, let's face it - they are the factory for the rest of the world. But how do we know they also enjoy not being able to participate in how their country works? In how their country is governed? We don't know. Why? Because Chinese are not allowed to speak freely (publicly at least..) to any outside (or inside) journalists.
We may think they are complacent and happy, as I think you do, but only because of their silence.
They are silent for a reason.
It’s really ironic you think democracy wouldn’t work in China, because it’s something “western”, that doesn’t fit the Chinese “history and culture”. Too bad that China has been ruled for more than seven decades by a western idea called Communism.
You call this a “social contract”? Abject fear of their regime’s fall is the only factor that sometimes forces the CCP to moderate or at least temporarily change their policies; they couldn’t care less about the interest of the Chinese people. As to the brave Chinese who dared to defy the regime on this occasion, we all know they will end up in the vengeful grinder of the communist mafia.
The very concept of “western style democracy” is an absurdity, a fake promoted by communist propagandists. Democracy simply refers to the people having the final say on electing leaders, taking major decisions and punishing (at the ballot box) the leaders who fail to keep their promises. When Taiwan or S Korea became democracies, they didn’t do so at the request of the “West” or copied “western” mechanisms. They pragmatically adopted democracy because it’s the only way to guarantee the rule of law, and their countries could not continue to develop without this rule of law. Communist China is not an “Eastern-style democracy”, it’s an authoritarian regime on its way to reverting to its totalitarian roots. Tyranny does not know East or West, it’s the same everywhere.
Hear! Hear!
Nicely said..
I agree with you, CPC is highly competent is several important areas that matter to ordinary citizens. That is they are very business friendly, not only to big business but also mom and pop shops, education, infrastructure and personal safety (violent crime is very low). This has created situation that every single Chinese lives vastly better than then he lived 10-20-30 years ago. On the other side they crack on personal liberties on every corner. For average Chinese this is great trade off, especially when we look what happened in West in same time period.
At same time US politicians have destroyed middle class, outsourced manufacturing, infrastructure has decayed that now many developing countries have better infrastructure than US. Healthcare not to mention. Cities in US every day look more like lawless cities from SF movies. School system has been degraded on every level. Opioid epidemic is destroying us. Majority of Americans now live worse of than their parents did.
And I am writing this not praise CPC just to point how our US politicians have failed America.
Sadly most people in US don't understand what happened in China and how US politicians have screwed the country, if they did, they would be up in arms. in 1990 China was one of poorest countries in the world. US was manufacturing powerhouse with vibrant middle class and largest trading partner to rest of the world. Today things have turned to be unrecognizable. Chinas middle class is growing, our is shrinking. They manufacture and export for the world. We on the other hand are drowning in debt, with little manufacturing left.
Do you REALLY want to argue that the average American does not live MUCH better than the average Chinese? Have you been to the United States?
And what is wrong with our infrastructure? Nothing, as far as I can see. Shouting about it is a way to get money allocated that is used in corrupt ways.
Yes, America has problems, but the best way of summing them up is if we don't get our act together, we might devolve into something like China.
And the Chinese economy is scarcely doing fantastic. From everything I read, the financial system is more wobbly than ours is. And obviously the lunatic and indefensible measures Xi is imposing on the people of China are hurting your economy a LOT. We do not suffer from this particular burden, and haven't for a year or more. It is true that lockdowns NEVER made any sense, and that we did them anyway, but over time I think that truth will get out to enough people that nothing like that will be politically impossible again--at least if we can figure out how to keep the Democrats from rigging elections.
Nobody is arguing that average Chinese lives better than average American. But that average Chinese has seen their life standard improve immensely for last 30 years, every single Chinese today lives better than he did 10 years ago.
At same time in America, middle class has been decimated, if you compare 1990, 2000 and today, country has taken significant downward trajectory in every single category. In 2000 our national debt was $5 trillion, today we are over $30 trillion with deficits out of control. This would be ok if money was invested in infrastructure and improving things at home. But we have no idea where it went, part of it was squandered in desastrus wars abroad.
Whats is wrong with US infrastructure => honestly where to begin, our infrastructure is terrible, nothing was done since 1980, and when compared to Europe we are 20 years behind, compared to China we are 40 years behind.
Our electric grid is falling, bridges have passed.
American society of civil engineers publishers report card every year
https://infrastructurereportcard.org/
Currently they give us bearly C-. Before coming to China, I also thought US infrastructure is ok, now US looks like developing country.
Again, I am not saying this to praise China, but point out, that our politicians have been sleeping on the job, letting country come to this state.
As for Chinese economy, I work here. True things are not great, but compared to US, China is manufacturing and trading juggernaut, with enormous trade surplus. Things are not ideal, but compared to mismanagement that is going on in US, they are in much better shape. First thing you learn when you come to China, is to stop beliving majority of things written in Western media, because they simply dont align with reality.
Until we start taking our US politicians accountable, things at home will not improve. If people knew, what is really going on in China, and how fast they are catching up, we have uprising in US, because people would see how politicians have faild us
We are well aware how our politicians have failed us, but the Chinese and others seem to be preventing fair elections that would put a better crop in office. Joe Biden takes bribes, and then crafts policy to suit the people who paid them. This is obvious to me at least.
But you are also obviously pushing propaganda, and I seriously doubt many on this forum are ignorant enough to fail to understand that. Yes, Chinese standards of living have risen. But China also operates concentration camps, tortures people at will, and reserves the right as a government to arrest anyone at any time for any reason, and very certainly for publicly saying things they don't want to hear, protesting, or failing to accept life as a de facto slave.
The Chinese have large pictures of a psychopathic mass murderer plastered all over the country. This murderers picture is on the currency. This is shameful.
You fail to understand why Chinese today revere Mao. Mao isn't venerated because of the excesses of the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, which many acknowledge were grave errors, but because he finally managed to unite China after the Century of Humiliation, which saw an aging Qing dynasty succumb to imperialistic depredations by both Japan and the West and which witnessed warlordism and internecine warfare between the KMT and CCP for decades following the collapse of the Qing in 1912. Mao managed to unite modern China in 1949 and after a century of chaos allowed the country to once again become the arbiter of its own destiny.
Given the history of slavery in America and the genocide of the Native Americans and the people associated with those events, I’m a little surprised that you even tried making this argument. The progressive left loves trying to cancel historical figures because they don’t match up to modern 21st century standards of decency. Was Andrew Jackson a psychopath also? He helped perpetuate actual genocide through warfare and slaughter and yet we have him on our $20 bill.
Oh... we in the US completely understand what has happened to the destruction of the working class here. I design and manufacture American OEM durable goods and our competencies cannot be matched by even China with their completely delusional labor rates.
We know that US politicians and their lobbyists offshored our competencies to their benefit - it is why we elected Trump and why THEY got rid of him. Mitch McConnell's wife owns a CCP shipping/shipbuilding business while he completely withdraws all RNC PAC from America First senate candidates that were chosen by the People in their states. The Biden family has taken millions from the Chinese.
Do we need a clearer picture of what our political class is there for?
Excellent commentary. I’m not praising the CCP either, only suggesting that it’s unnuanced to view it as some sort of demonic entity. In any case, the social contract between the Chinese government and its people should be something that they negotiate themselves. I don’t necessarily see it as something for Americans to worry about.
Many commenters seem to believe that competent and functioning government is totally irrelevant as long as individuals attain some abstract notion of freedom and no one can tell them what to do. This mindset strikes me as naïve at best. I don’t see many people here clamoring to live in India and if they did for any extended period of time I'm sure their viewpoint would become far more nuanced.
I don’t think this ‘social contract’ you continue to refer to is negotiable.
Do you?
Chinese Social contract is different than one we have in the west and is based on "Mandate of Heaven" (even atheist and religion-hating CPC claims to have the Mandate of Heaven). This concept is very different from concepts in west. Western Democracy is based on idea that people vote thus provide democratic legitimacy to the government. Western Royalty is based on Idea that Royalty has God given right to rule.
Mandate of Heaven on the other hands proclaims that heaven bestows mandate to just and capable Ruler to rule over China (Be it emperor or CPC or any other government). And as long as ruler is providing for majority people and treats them well, keeps stability. Ruler has right to rule over China. If government mistreats and abused people and not provides, it will lose mandate and people will rise and overthrow them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_of_Heaven
It is very interesting concept and explains a lot, why China is the way it is.
When I first came to China, I was same opinion as you, but after learning about mandate of heaven and how it is important for China from historical context, many things become much more clear.
Here is amazing documentary about China and CPC, it has several parts, and brings enemies of CPC and CPC stooges to discuss China and engage in honest discussion, in one of parts they also touch topic of Mandate of Heaven
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCwibvjj0jE
It is amazing watch, because you get Dissidents and CPC people talking and discussing.
Again I am not defending CPC, I just believe that we Westerners would benefit allot if we understood Chinese and their way of thinging little better.
The whole point of the Constitution--which is the most brilliant political document ever enacted by a major nation in human history in my view--is that we need government. Nobody disputes this. Thomas Paine in Common Sense agreed with this.
He merely said that if we enact a government to protect us and it winds up ABUSING us, then we have the worst of all worlds, don't we? This means the government has to be fenced in, like a wild beast, or raging fire, and used for its appropriate uses, and otherwise forced into background irrelevance as far as most major life decisions are concerned.
Government cannot free anyone. It can prevent one set of individuals from being abused by another. But in China the government is used to ABUSE people who don't like it. I read you have death wagons where organs are harvested from Falun Gong members, for use in the bodies of senior Party members. You have cameras all over the cities of Tibet so that when monks set themselves on fire in protest you can have them off the street in less than five minutes. You gang rape female Tibetan nuns in Chinese jails. Up to a million Uighurs are being treated roughly like the Germans treated the Jews they didn't murder outright.
No, you should feel deep shame trying to rationalize all this. Your government is a model for psychopaths, and no one else.
The cause for the uplifting of millions of Chinese citizens from poverty is not the fact that it was overseen by the CCP, but the fact that the CCP has halfway lifted its heavy boot from the throat of the Chinese people. These days the boot is coming down again, because a truly modern China and rule by the CCP are incompatible (a modern China requires rule of law, not just shiny skyscrapers).
Thanks for the information. Which I both respect and accept except as to Uyghurs. And my solution to that is to not do business with companies that collaborate with China. My concern is not what China does for her citizens. My concern is for China's aspirations, if any, in the rest of the world.
You can stop with the hyperbole, Raziel. No one on the continent of North America during our time of temporary lockdowns was ever forced to stay in their apartments either chained in or with doors welded shut.
I do not think we can ever be compared to the dystopia now taking place ( and apparently has been for over a year) in certain Chinese cities, where an overzealous authoritarian regime is herding citizens into what literally are home internment camps.
Raziel, thank God you are still with us (in this comments family). I was wondering where you were. Thank you for your frontline reporting. Wow you are so correct. Eye-opening.
Definitely eye opening!
Agree with you. The 89 protest was for democracy, and more forward looking, this one is more of a reaction to the lockdown policy.
lol, you clearly work for the CCP as a professional troll/agenda pusher.
Yup..
I inquired upthread, but would like to know more.
I see the supply issues in the US as something which must be severely impacting China. The people who were producing these products must not be working today. Are they starving? I fear the worst. I hope you can reassure me that this is just civil unrest and not some horrific genocide happening in your nation.
You can live in Beijing and still not get the full picture because you don’t belong there - just a foreigner. When you have at least some people going from specific protest demands to openly shouting against the communist government, in an authoritarian regime you’ve gone over a critical threshold. You need to be born in this and absorb it every day to understand what it really means.
Raziel. I would love to hear more about what is really happening there and write about it on my Substack. You have made some very interesting points. Stay well
Smells like CCP.
Brilliant post - all true!
When you compare the bravery of the citizens of China and Iran to the “resist” Blueanon crowd in the US, the contrast is striking.
I used to manage a team in China and travel there a few times a year. One guy on my team, in particular, was very western. He LOVED the US and especially, the NBA (I got to take him to a Celtics game when he came over to the states which was awesome).
When he was in the states or we were on calls together (not on WeChat mind you), we would discuss politics, what was happening in Hong Kong at the time, etc. But, on a trip to China, we were getting coffee one afternoon, and I brought up a topic we had discussed many times before...around the difference between the expectations of Americans to have a government that respects individual liberty vs. the Chinese expectations of a strongman leader, and he got VERY uncomfortable. Later he asked me to not bring up those discussions in public when I’m in China because you never know who’s listening.
I was really taken aback. It was one of those small moments that makes you appreciative to be an American; that I never have to worry about who is listening over my shoulder (other than for the fear of liberal schoolmarms, to wag their finger at me).
Praying for the Chinese people, and hope that at the very least American companies (looking at you, Apple and Google), can stay out of the way and not aid the Chinese government in their repression.
Yes -- and to add to that, even in an American classroom, a Chinese student who says something negative about the CCP will disappear. I have seen this happen a few times.
The only way that would happen is if other students informed on him or her. A rat-ocracy. A nation of Pavel Morozovs. Despicable.
You missed the news. China has secret police offices around the US. Probably using many other methods than passive receipt of informer statements. Active bugging, plants, etc.
I'll take "Things Thay Have Never Happened" for $800, Alex.
Indeed, it did happen. I'll take Comprof is a narcissistic gas lighter for $10,000.
You said, "I've seen it myself."
No. It did not happen. You do not teach Chinese students. You are not in education, in any way shape or form. You have never taught a Chinese student that was in class on Monday, then was "disappeared" on Wednesday.
This is hilarious— thanks for the laugh.
1. You claimed Chinese students in American schools, who criticize the CCP, "disappear."
2. You also claimed to have see/experienced this yourself.
Well....
The only "Chinese students in American schools" you could be referring to are either undergrad college students or graduate students at the various institutions in the U.S..
However....
YOU are not in academia and have ZERO interaction with undergrad/graduate international students, Chinese or otherwise.
So, you are a liar.....or maybe you can share with the class more details re: you claim?
Yeah....thought so....
Thanks for the laugh!
I quoted you directly.
The laughable one is you.
You are a liar.
Provide evidence for your claim.
Yes. The encouragement of single-minded thinking and safetyism that is happening in law schools today is especially disturbing.
I had a similar experience in Prague in 1984 when my hosts turned the radio up VERY loud during our discussion of political/social issues.
I had to learn the lesson from a Russian man in Costa Rica. Not good if the government caught wind that you're not happy with lockdown business closures.
How long will your comfort be the case in America under the tech overlords and Democrat autocrats?
I agree. The trend in the US is not going in the right direction.
Yes, try putting a Make America Great Again sticker on your car.
When you compare what real loss/aabsence of freedoms in China and Iran is like to the Qanon/MAGA crowd idea of "loss of freedom," the contrast is striking.
I still don’t understand the fear attached to Qanon but not attached to the lefts favorite go-to conspiracy validation; “unnamed sources close to the investigation?”
Both are anonymous but one is stigmatized the other embraced like some kind of gold standard.
Q Anon people are recovering socialists with a mix of former religious people who are now atheists looking for a human savior. They are still practicing socialists pretending to be rebels. They are still waiting on a great reset and a check in the mail for $100,000.00. They insist that there are secret military tribunals and executions happening behind the scenes. They are still socialists. Are they planted to make Republicans look like fools? Maybe not, but in my opinion they are the far left wing of the party and need to be identified as such.
They are called bluanon.
I like how all those Supreme Court leaks, according to the right-wing media/pundits, were the work of a "leftists clerk".....but it was Alito.
Got a link?
https://www.axios.com/2022/11/29/supreme-court-alito-ethics-2014-leak
Sigh....
https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/roberts-letter-redacted-annotated/fb6e34bb904bfafa/full.pdf
Sigh. I heard from my pool guy that he had a friend who heard from another friend and then Hank Johnson dropped his “Guam Tipping” studies so he could investigate!
Hobbs, anything?
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/3753516-supreme-court-responds-to-lawmakers-over-alleged-hobby-lobby-leak/
None of these links reveal what you've implied. At all.
So how much freedom do you have to lose before it’s ok to protest? Or does the government get to decide that too? Just making sure I know for next time.
I think having to wear a mask when going into a grocery store is where the line should be drawn.
and yet we were told that "fiery but mostly peaceful protests" were perfectly fine and not violent. The bottom line is a protest is protected speech regardless of whether you agree with it.
Let me ask you....
If you had 10,100 apples.
and 570 of them were rotten.
Would you have "mostly good" apples?
and let me ask you, if you had one apple that you worked your entire life to grow, maybe it was all you had, and then it was burned to a crisp or mashed up to into apple sauce (in violation of existing destruction of property and trespassing laws), would you give a flying f*** about the other 10,099 apples, or why the burner/masher/destroyer thought it was okay to do that to your apple?
The CCP and the desires of the Blueanon crowd have much in common. All you have to do is listen to the unhinged rants of Hillary Clinton of late to see the authoritarian desires of both.
Yes....Hillary is a CCP Communist.
I hate masks, too.
We are not that far removed. Would you put a Make America Great Again sticker on your car?
I’m hopeful but I question many leaders in the West’s true resolve. We saw they were perfectly happy to squelch protestors in their own country (Canada and Australia for example) using methods the CCP would have been proud to call their own. As a result, any vocal support from many of these clowns will be nothing but empty virtue.
I have seen many people comparing Trudeau's "well of course the people of China should be able to protest" with his own behavior toward Canadian citizens who were protesting.
Same. It truly is hypocritical. Especially considering he froze bank accounts and took away protestor funds on go fund me. How is that not at the level of the CCP??
But Celia, those protests were directed at him and therefore were unacceptable. And at least one of the protestors was, or was pretending to be, a Nazi and some were even, heaven forbid, Republicans and people who weren’t demanding that Trump be arrested. And other protestors watch FOX NEWS rather than the State-Approved and patriotic CBC
And a Confederate. Don't forget the Confederate.
We see the same thing happening in Iran, with young people rising up and saying "No!"
Unfortunately, leaders in the West--and particularly the current leaders of the federal government of the U.S.--are more sympathetic to the leaders of authoritarian regimes like China and Iran than they are to the protestors. Oh, there are some tacit comments about people's right to protest; meanwhile, international deals are still being struck with the dictators crushing the protestors.
The sad reality is that these particular governments WILL NOT STOP murdering their own citizens. No one on the global stage has the will to make them stop or even think twice.
I remember when Obama said little/nothing about the Iranian regime mowing down protesters during the Arab Spring.
Now it’s just par for the course.
Obama went further and shipped hundreds of millions of dollars to Iran. He was really an idiot.
The sad thing is he is not an idiot, it’s worse, he’s evil.
Obama wanted JCPOA, so he kept quiet about Iranian protests. Foolish.
Yes, just as Biden is doing.
Sadly, yes.
One of the most stupid foreign policy objectives I have seen in a very long time.
Two phrases came to mind as I read your spot on comment. Might Makes Right and Never Again. Always easy to make courageous proclamations far from the violence. History makes clear that good intentions and desires have a hard time standing up to real power held by ruthless people. Whether the people of Iran or China will prevail is far from certain at this point. Just as was the case 245 years ago when the redcoats were coming.
Do Americans have the courage of Col. Parker and his men on Lexington Green that cold April morning when they faced down the armed might of the British Empire? Based on the servile and cowardly response to the pandemic, I'm afraid we know the answer.
Except on collegev quads where they are gleeful when they have a 10:1 advantage against a poor sap who will not conform
It changed when Bennie Rhodes and Obama sold this to the sheep;
Ben Rhodes, "Cuba Views Political Prisoners as Having Broken Laws!" (Much Like N. Korea, just thinking the wrong thing is against the law!) http://freebeacon.com/politics/rhodes-cuba-political-prisoners-broken-cuban-law/
(Human Rights) White House Justifies Imprisonment of Cuban Dissidents By Promoting Regime Excuse (Having Broken the Laws) https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2016/03/22/white-house-justifies-imprisonment-of-cuban-dissidents-they-broke-the-law-n2137553
And continues; now sacrificed on the alter of MMGW!
John Kerry downplayed China human rights abuses to deal on climate
https://nypost.com/2021/05/06/concerns-kerry-downplayed-china-human-rights-abuses-for-climate-deal/?utm_campaign=iphone_nyp&utm_source=mail_app
Kerry: Protecting Planet ‘First and Foremost’ in Dealings with China,
Not Human Rights, Life Is ‘Full of Tough Choices’ https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2021/09/22/kerry-protecting-planet-first-and-foremost-in-dealings-with-china-not-human-rights-life-is-full-of-tough-choices/
I’m old enough to remember the world protesting the imprisonment of Mandela who, if viewed through the prism of the above had, after all, broken the laws of S Africa!
Memories these days are frowned upon as you know. History that does not fit the narrative of the anointed must be memory holed. Guys like Kerry cannot be shamed when it comes to the gross hypocrisy. It is in their DNA
And securing Ukraine's freedom.from Putin.
Like Bari Weiss's interview with Benjamin Netanyahu, this is a very powerful article and report by a courageous, experienced and well informed journalist.
To me, this is the kind of journalism that we used to see in the Wall Street Journal, NY Times and WaPo, but they all have so many commercial conflicts of interest that we don't see this kind of reporting much anymore.
CNBC's and the NY Time's Andrew Ross Sorkin's interview yesterday with Sam Bankman-Fried about his FTX catastrophe was just as gripping and impressive.
As a reader and viewer, I don't know enough to fact check anyone. That is why I read and watch so many versions and recaps of important stories on web sites like Common Sense, TheDispatch.com, wsj.com, Seekingalpha.com and WaPo.
After you do your homework, you can jump to some conclusions, but you do it with humility because you know that in a few minutes new information will become available that may change your view of things.
Some stories, like China's, are not new. They're just more of the same depressing reports about how power-greedy people are so willing to destroy and take other people's lives on their ways to political power.
No greed is worse than the greed for political power.
"CNBC's and the NY Time's Andrew Ross Sorkin's interview yesterday with Sam Bankman-Fried about his FTX catastrophe was just as gripping and impressive."
How about fawning and repellent? He was interviewing a latter day Madoff. Sorkin is a reptile. The crowd was worse.
Interviews like that serve to give legitimacy to criminals like SBF. It's publicity to say hey, he's not a bad guy like those dirty Trumpers. He just made a few mistakes with other people's money on his path to effective altruism!
Exactly right. I was thinking the same thing after reading Donald E.L. Johnson's post on SBF interview. SBF should be charged with criminal misconduct. He robbed Peter to pay Paul. He went and spent millions on his lifestyle and bought a massive mansion in the Bahamas that he put in his parents name. Even suggesting maybe he's a "lousy businessman" is absurd. He knew exactly what he was doing. As for altruism, any "billionaire" can pledge to give their wealth away. That doesn't mean squat. All they do is park it in a DAF fund and enjoy tax benefits. Bill Gates is a master at that.
As a retired business and markets journalist and publisher and as a speculator who doesn't own or trade crypto currencies, I thought Sorkin asked well informed, probing, tough and even skeptical questions. I don't think they were fawning.
As for SBF, he struck me as a very intelligent guy. He got himself into a business he couldn't control or manage, and he made a lot of strategic, tactical and critical managerial mistakes. He obviously has a wonderful memory, but smart people do a lot of dumb things. Often they get away with their mistakes and misdeeds and recover from them.
SBF isn't getting away with anything. Whether and how he'll recover won't be known for years or even decades, if ever.
Is he a con man? Is he just a lousy businessman? Is he a fool? A lot of smart, wise people seem to think he is all of the above. For me, it's too early to really know.
I don't think the interview gave SBF legitimacy. Nothing can or will. I think the interview will help speculators learn that when there is no there there, don't get sucked in.
Thanks for bringing some common sense to the Common Sense Comments section.
Great comment. Clear, concise, honest, and humble. Too bad the MSM are none of those.
Are the lockdowns really about covid? Or are they a way to minimize the rioting? The Chinese people have a lot to be angry about other than the covid policy. They lost their money buying apartments that never existed, there aren’t enough women to marry the men, and they are being watched wherever they go, whatever they do. And now they have Mao 2.0 for life.
Once the totalitarians gain control, it's extraordinarily difficult to remove them. But not impossible.
Yet there are always quislings, looking to bend to the power of the state. We saw them in full bloom during our pandemic. Willing to sacrifice liberty for the illusion of safety. Swallowing and repeating the lies of those in power. That the vaccines worked and were safe. They clearly don't and they aren't. That lockdowns work. They don't. And the damage - physical, psychological and economic are staggering. That masks are essential. They aren't. They are marks of nothing but abject fear and obeisance (driving masked and alone????) And that moral and good people would accede to the trashing of the Bill of Rights and accept vaccine mandates. Or craziest of all, that Jesus would want you to take the jab.
Our own totalitarian liars are different from the Chinese tyrants only in degree, not in inclination.
The fate of the Ceausescus should be the fate of all tyrants.
UYGHURS
I have no sympathy for people who oppose one totalitarian ideology while embracing another. What do the Uyghurs expect from a government that knows how totalitarianism works?
In addition, I am more concerned with the domestic power exercised by Chairman Biden than President Xi as, closer to home, Midshipmen are denied graduation by the USNA because they refuse to take a rushed, experimental “vaccine” that doesn’t work and poses known and yet denied health risks in the short term and unknown health risks in the long term.
DOWN WITH BIDEN AND TRUDEAU AND THEIR BLOODY, BLOOD-CLOT-PRODUCING, REGIMES
We want to “renegotiate” too. Free, fair, and transparent elections. Election Day, not election months. NO BALLOT HARVESTING. No state supported racism. Equality under the law.
They are actually a joke now, sadly.
The only thing that really matters is control of the army. No revolution or major change can take place in China while the army is totally under the control of the party.
Probably, but I doubt the army can do it alone. It’s easy to intimidate unarmed people if you have guns. But who do you intimidate? For that, you need informers. Playing whack-a-mole only works for the moles that appear. Most won’t, but in their hearts, they’re not playing on Team CCP. How to find them? In revolutionary Russia and France, everyone spied on everyone. If the dynamic of the Chinese version works the same way, the ratio of rebels to rats will run close to 50/50.
That’s plainly unstable: either the rebels will win and there will be a real cultural revolution, or the repression will escalate and blood will run in the streets. I’m not betting on either side in this one. Too close to call.
That may change with a failed invasion of Taiwan.
At some point many in the army will refuse to attack and kill their fellow citizens. It may take longer in China since the respect for life is so much less than in the West, but it can happen.
It's said that in 1989 local Beijing based units were first deployed and refused orders to fire on the crowds, but they brought in units from a distant province in the West and told them the protestors were terrorists and anti-China and...you know the rest.
Somewhat related to this in the spirit of information flow and the fact that all of us are finally understanding things outside of our bubbles: SEVEN THOUSAND PEDOPHILES are being released in the state of California.
The people releasing these cretins are pro-criminal DEMOCRATS and these pedophiles will be coming to a state near you.
There are links to support this, but do not want to clog Bari's comment section with hyperlink issues.
Are they just "pro-criminal?" Or something much darker and worse?
You know they are darker and worse, sir.
The Democrats must love pedophiles. They elected one, the ever senile Joe, as president.
Unless you are a Democrat this is hard to watch. R T and compro will probably copy this link so they can watch it over and over again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hy8Wc0r4qBc
And in California they:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11453859/Thousands-convicted-pedophiles-California-getting-year-prison-time.html
I can see R T and compro buying a bus ticket to California right now. After all they not only support their fellow Dems, they fawn over them, praise them and vote for them. Their motto is "Vote early and vote often."
Fascinating: none of the coverage I’ve read so far made the explicit connection that The Urumqi fire specifically affected Uyghurs. Granted, some mentioned the region and I could have inferred this. My geography is not as solid as it might be and I didn’t make the connection.
Yes I assumed that Han Chinese living in Urumqi were killed, and that most Chinese people wouldnt care about the Uyghurs.
It sometimes feels too easy to project our own desires and cultural assumptions onto other peoples. No doubt there are those young Chinese who yearn for a Western-style freedom; but let’s not jump to conclusions about what the Chinese people want.
Clearly the Covid restrictions are the main rub.
Sic semper tyrannus.
Hopefully the Chi-Comms don’t invade Taiwan as a way to divert attention from their domestic problems.
I think the world would be a much better place without the regimes currently running China and Iran, but I think we should be prepared for the violence that usually follows regime changes.
Interesting parallel in that the CCP is going to extremes to "eradicate a virus" while on the other side of the world, a certain faction is going to extremes to "eradicate "racism."" Both result in censorship and incarceration, be it literal or figurative.
The following quote assumes that locking people indoors and other extreme measures are the cause of a lower COVID death rate in China. Actually, the cause of a lower COVID death rate in China is that the death rate is less than 1% and all of these measures are pure folly. Add to this that one cannot eradicate a virus anyway.
FOLLY. On both sides of the world. FOLLY.
"True, the country has seen relatively few Covid deaths, but it has come at a steep price: to keep people inside, the authorities have, in many cases, welded apartment doors shut or locked them with chains."
Unfortunately these protests will be snuffed out like Tiananmen, Hong Kong, and Jimmy Lai. American corporations could make a difference but are too reliant on China and therefore, cowardly. People like Steve Kerr and Mark Cuban are enablers and justify their involvement by saying “the U.S. isn’t perfect either”