I've been seeing a huge amount of anti-Chinese sentiment online, from obvious places like reddit, to even misinformed friends on social media falling victim to viral posts filled with misinformation.
What are we to make of this? Is this the slow march to war, by portraying them as pure evil, à la the fake story of Iraqi soldiers killing Kuwaiti babies to help get the public on board with our military response? It seems disadvantageous for the US and their allies to fight China, as we are incredibly reliant upon them economically and don't stand to gain much from the conflict.
Are these the irrational decisions of a dying empire? Or is there something else at play?
Yeah this is my take as well. It's similar to Russiagate bullshit. Sure there might be something there but like, we have a whole lot of domestic house cleaning to do before we even begin to address other countries' misdeeds. Even then our only sources are mostly government propaganda from either side and we have no reason to believe one over the other.
All I know is that it fucking sucks as a Chinese diaspora to see rampant sinophobia in nearly all of my media, tolerated, lauded, and even expected.
Had to quit reddit completely because of how disgusting the racism was.
All of their talking points are old and blatantly false, I would know as a chinese person who regularly goes back to China, and stays in contact with my family in China. But it's exhausting to try and refute their talking points, especially when they don't even see you as a human being, only a brainwashed CCP shill etc etc.
I'm just tired and disgusted by it all.
It's incredibly exhausting, and that's when I only have to see it on the English internet. I have to remove myself from it every time because the dehumanization just gets to be too much. And they won't listen to you. Anything that some white "China expert" says is law, no matter how racist and easily disproved. We don't get the same purchase as real human beings. Issues that are approached with nuance and depth in their own countries are just painted with one brush for us.
Such is life though, I was born Indonesian-Chinese under Suharto, so at least it's better than that.
If you don't mind telling, which country do you live in now? are you confronted in irl to the same kind of racism than on reddit?
Also, what are the most common/frequent sinophobic comments that you are talking about?
Don't really want to dox myself, but let's just say a five eyes country.
The racism irl is less blatant, but that's mostly because I haven't left the house in months (lockdown). Regardless, there's plenty of videos of anyone asian looking getting harassed and attacked online these few months. It honestly makes me worried about leaving the house. People avoid us for looking asian, especially since we wear masks, and give us dodgy looks. My mother got some rocks thrown at her from afar. Lovely people aren't they.
And the sinophobia? I don't even know where to start. Remember when covid just started going in China? And there were pics of the doctors and nurses faces with marks and bruises from wearing their masks for so long. It was immediately drowned in comments like - "it's chinese propaganda", "it's all fake", "lol why the fuck do they have bruises from just masks" etc etc. Plenty of posts about how China owns reddit, and that their 'brave' posts about "China Badddd" will be removed so upvote and give rewards now! Other dumb shit I see a lot is "lol suicide nets", "lol communism no food" (particularly insulting when my parents went through that shit, and a lot of the famine was because of natural disasters but ok). Also "China lied, people died", wtf man. How can you blame china for the incompetence of your own government?
"chinazi" "Zhina/Shina" are very aggravating as well. I really hated how insults used by the Japanese during the invasion were being leveraged against China, when it was Japan who invaded China and ruthlessly raped and murdered the Chinese. How is any of this ok? Where's the moral outrage?
There's this constant vibe of dehumanising when westerners talk about Chinese people. If there are bad news (usually fake and western propaganda) about China, they always talk about how shit the Chinese people have it, and how oppressive their government is, how it is a living hell over there etc etc. But if anyone defends them, they're a shill or wumao. If they're Chinese, even worse, they're brainwashed. So, the Chinese people both need to be "saved" and also don't know how to think. Ok then.
Other bullshit I see are constant comparisons to robots. Chinese people are not fucking robots, they work hard ok? It's amazing what you can do when you have steep competition.
There's a lot of other bs on the internet, it's honestly very draining for me to recall and write them down. I think a lot of people forget that Chinese people are real, and some of them are even abroad.
I'm not saying the CPC is perfect, but I'm saying that it has done so well for the common people that I'm jealous. You don't understand how poor and war torn China was less than 100 years ago. The poverty, the famine, the trauma. It's all very real to my parents, and they tell it to me. Nowadays, we have high speed rail for super cheap, excellent food everywhere for cheap, and access to healthcare that is also very cheap. We literally travel back to China for the healthcare, and tour all over China on the trains. The food is great, but GuangZhou is where it's at!
Feel free to ask me more, assuming they're in good faith.
How easy is it for me to come visit as a white dude from a five eyes country? I've always wanted to take a train vacation, but it's so goddamn cumbersome and expensive here. I just wanna spend a week or two zipping around on trains and eating some good food—introducing my kids to a cool new culture would be icing on the cake.
I'll say it's not too hard, and having the phone app Wechat makes life very easy. Add money to Wechat, then you can book hotels and trains on the app (and buy literally anything with it). You may need to collect real life train tickets however, as you have a foreign passport. Collect these tickets at the train station, there's english everywhere as well so you can get around. The translations are a bit off sometimes, so it may take some guesswork. Feel free to ask the officials standing around the place, they usually are happy to help.
If you can't get Wechat, or can't add money to it, you can buy tickets online or in person at the train stations. I'll say that Wechat is useful if you're the more spontaneous, YOLO type of traveller. Otherwise, you can plan it out without Wechat.
Things get expensive if you're getting first class train tickets lol, then again it costed around 2000 chinese yen to get from Guangzhou to Xian (1308 km flight distance). Not too bad? Standard tickets are not bad at all, and there are so many trains, all the time. Some trains are sleeper types (which I adore), which also have economy and first class beds.
I've seen plenty of foreign backpackers on the trains in China, even in the most obscure small cities. So yeah, definitely not difficult for foreign people (inc. five eyes) to travel in China. People might look at you a bit more than you are comfortable with in the smaller towns, simply because they don't see many foreigners. Hope you don't get easily weirded out! Otherwise, stick to the mainstream and big cities.
Hotels aren't too expensive, and hostels are a thing there. Since you have kids I recommend hotels instead, and go with the chain ones (like 七天 or 如家). The prices vary with location in the city ofc, so the more "hot" ones are relatively expensive. I'll say a standard price for a twin bed room is 250 yen? Could be cheaper, could be easily more.
For good food, defintely zip around in the Guangdong province (and the aforementioned Guangzhou). If you like spicy food, go to Sichuan (beware of earthquakes though). If you like sweet foods, go to Hangzhou and Shanghai. And for weird and sour flavours, go to Guizhou.
There's so much to see in China, I'm not sure what to recommend haha. If you like mountains, there are plenty of beautiful ones in China, and they are usually very accessible to all people. E.g. Zhangjiajie or Huangshan.
I really wanted to go to Xinjiang via Gansu this year, I've seen some nice pics/vids of really beautiful train journeys along those areas. But then Covid happened, so I'm stuck at home.
Hope that helps? Feel free to ask more
Hey, I'm relatively neutral on all this China stuff, if not a bit wary, but I have a few questions since a lot of news on China are simply biased from the get-go :
- What do you think of China's buying sprees all accross the globe, and seizure of assets when these countries find themselves unable to pay ? (ex : Sri Lankan port). I know the US does way fucking worse, but China doesn't appear to be exactly benevolent. I know they financed projects in Ethiopia for their oil and signed contracts with them, but the contracts always seem to disfavour the countries that sign them.
- What do you think about the South China sea tensions ?
- What do you think about surveillance, social credit, and other "totalitarian" measures implemented or to be implemented ? A lot of it is sentionalized bullshit by western media, but there is some truth to it from what I know.
- Speaking of sentionalized stuff, what do you think about China's involvement in Tibet and Xinjiang ?
- What's your take on racism in China, like for white monkey jobs, the way blacks are seen there, or the apparent Xenophobia ?
- Do you think China will, as some tankies say, allow for a greater control of the means of productions by the working class and democratize ?
- Lastly, even if it's less serious, how do Chinese people view Europe ? And France in my case ? I know it's a big country, but what is the general vibe people have about these ?
Anyway, hope you can answer these for me comrade.
That's a lot of questions, and I am not an expert on all things politics, but here are some of my attempts: Once again, I don't speak for all Chinese people.
- I'll say this video answers a lot of your worries about "debt traps" etc. Keep in mind that China regularly waives debts from poorer countries as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBgbYQ5QAM0
Yanis Varoufakis is straight up not a fan of China either, so you don't have to worry about bias here. Another thing to keep in mind is that these countries can think for themselves. If they believe that the contract is a shitty one, they can decide not to sign it. Again, there are other places to borrow money. These other places may be less than ideal however, and I'm sure these countries have thought for themselves and chose China.
- South China seas. I'll be honest, I have no idea what to think about it. Maybe have a look at r/sino for some far more educated thoughts. Here's one of their links, judge for yourself:
https://isdp.eu/publication/understanding-chinas-position-south-china-sea-disputes/#_ftn2
- Think of the social credit as your normal credit. Again, I'm going to post some links etc for you to judge yourself:
https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/futher-regulating-social-credit/
Or if you like twitter threads: https://nitter.net/chinalawtransl8/status/1288196385637052418
And here is some context for why this is used instead of the credit system in the west:
"Many of you have probably heard about the “Social Credit” system being developed in China particularly from western media. However, “Social Credit” is a product of bad translation between Mandarin an English as “Social Credit” in English sounds like a credit score on your social media or social interactions, however, this is not the case. The Mandarin meaning of the phrase is more closely related to Socialism. A “Socialism Credit” but that doesn’t make much sense in English. It is a Credit Worthiness rating system very similar to that of the ones in the West. Think “Credit rating with Socialist Characteristics”. Here is one list of relevant documents on the planning of the social credit system. A reader of this will note that the focus is not on controlling dissent or influencing your social media like western articles have suggested, but rather towards building a regulatory framework around financial activities and legal compliance.
So, you may be wondering, if it's just a Financial Credit Worthiness Rating system, why not just use one identical to the rest of the world. Well that is because only 30+ years ago China was a poor country with no financial industry or credit systems. As China grew Chinese culture ingrained in the people to save, save, save and never live past your means, like take on debt. In 2016 China had a Household Savings Rate of 36.1%. Which is one of the highest in the world.
For comparison, here are some other 2016 world economies Household Savings Rate:
South Korea: 7.2% Japan: 2.4% United States: 4.9% Australia: 8.9% Germany: 9.6% Switzerland: 17.8%
Because of this extraordinarily high savings rate, and the advent of digital payment systems in 2004 with Alipay and then WeChat pay in 2011 Credit Cards while still used and commonly accepted are not commonly used and never caught on with the majority of the public in China. By 2012, only 25% of Chinese consumers had a credit card. By 2015 50% of consumer payment transactions were being done from mobile payment platforms. Because of this, most Chinese consumers don’t have a credit history to build a traditional credit score on. However, I would like to point out that in recent years there has been a rapid increase in credit card/consumer debt usage. So the government’s idea to solve the gap in determining people’s creditworthiness was to create a creditworthiness rating that takes in factors such as other governmental public data like rent payment, delayed payment to common reserve fund, defrauding/cheating the healthcare fund, common reserve fund, wages, embezzlement charges as well as on top of your financial credit history. In around 2016/2017 the Chinese government gave a number of private corporations licenses to create their own Social Credit scoring systems with whatever available data they had to test out the idea. "
Source and more details: https://www.reddit.com/r/Sino/wiki/faq/social-credit-system
- Xinjiang has oil and rare earths. Lol need I say more.
Here's something interesting about the terrorist attacks in Xinjiang: "Throughout the 1990s, hundreds of Uyghurs were transported to Afghanistan by the CIA for training in guerrilla warfare by the mujahideen. When they returned to Xinjiang, they formed the East Turkistan Islamic Movement and came under Çatlı's expert direction. Graham Fuller, CIA superspy, offered this explanation for radicalizing the Chinese Muslims: The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them [Muslims] against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against the Red Army. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia. This policy of destabilization was devised by Bernard Lewis, an Oxford University specialist on Islamic studies, who called for the creation of an “Arc of Crisis” around the southern borders of the Soviet Union by empowering Muslim radicals to rebel against their Communist overlords."
Quote from Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia by Paul L. Williams. He's a Evangelical Christian type nutcase which hates islam so take this quote with a lot of salt.
Despite all the terrorist attacks in Xinjiang, national news do not report on it very much. To do so would stir up tensions between the Han and the Uyghurs, when cooperation and unity is needed.
The BRI also goes through Xinjiang, and for trouble to start there of all places, especially after China announced BRI, is doubly suspicious.
You know anyone can travel to Xinjiang right? If they had some shady shit to hide, why let people travel there?
Okay, some context for Tibet. Tibet in the past really was not this happy go lucky, all about peace and meditation, Buddhist and holy place. That is an purposefully cultivated, orientalist view of Tibet. Back then, serfs were a thing. Those in the upper echelons of Tibetan society can do anything to those on the bottom, and this was usually violent abuse. See Michael Parenti's essay on Tibet, it's very comprehensive: http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html
And some history of Tibet: https://nitter.net/i/status/1270468493016576000
Carl Zha is really good at long af threads about geopolitics, but some sentences can be difficult to parse.
- Racism in China
Hmmm, "white monkey" jobs may exist, not sure how common it is though, especially nowadays. You do see them occasionally in ads, posing awkwardly haha. I'll say that it manifests from 崇洋媚外, where some Chinese people adore all things Western and foreign, and hate all things Chinese. It's a really shitty self-hating attitude, but you do see them in some people. This manifests in many ways, one of which may be using white people to promote products.
As for racism against black people, I would say that it may exist, but generally it isn't violent and systemic. It stems from ignorance, because they simply don't see many black people in China. What they do see may come from Western media (which they have access to, because VPNs). Using black people as slaves was not a thing in China, nor was colonising Africa in Chinese history. Thus, the things a select few Chinese people say or do may seem racist or at least insensitive in American eyes, comes from not knowing better. This sort of history is not exactly well known to all Americans/Westerners either, how many can explain why watermelon is a racist trope used against black people? It was because slave-owners wanted to depict black people as simple minded and easily kept happy, with foods such as watermelon.
As Mao says, it doesn't matter if it is a white or a black cat, as long as it catches rats.
- Seizing the means of production
Mate I have no clue. All I know is that capitalism is really state controlled, and not the other way round. The rich really have to be careful now, and there are quite a few cases of billionaires being executed. Not sure if you saw this news, but essentially this billionaire's financial empire had been seized and redistributed: https://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/3093663/chinas-regulator-seizes-control-six-insurers-trust-firms-mass
- Views on Europe and France I do not speak for all Chinese people, here's the vibe I personally get from my relatives etc in China
Europe and France is generally viewed as much better than America, but even then, not all dislike America. The positive views Chinese people have on these countries is reflected in the names Chinese people have for these countries. America, 美国, translates as "beautiful country". England, 英国, translates as "brave country". France, 法国, translates as "Just/lawful country". I'm not joking, these are really what these names translate to. I don't mean that they literally think France is lawful, but it is positively viewed. I'm pretty sure most Chinese people think of Paris when they think of France, and they think of a very romanticised life with wine and the Eiffel tower in the background. As well as expensive fashion lol. Those who actually go there may or may not get Paris syndrome, but I think that may be more of a Japanese phenomenon. Hmmm, not sure what else to say here. Those who are into geopolitics may want Europe to stand up against the US more? And they hope Germany sets the trend in doing so.
I hope that answers some of your questions?
Thanks for your answer Chad, I'll read it before I head to sleep. Have yourself a good day/night too.
The US is trying to cold war 2.0 with China. They want to encircle, isolate, and balkanize them (hence the Uigher shit to try and push separatism in a vital trade region, hence HK shit, etc). Some amount of the capitalists have come to understand the liberalization of China has failed, their attempts to steal its wealth has failed and it is gaining the upper hand and has a communist party with many disciplined communists in it in power and they are in panic mode now.
It's also a nice distraction for them, they can, instead of taking the blame themselves for outsourcing to increase profits blame the Chinese for "not playing by the rules" and "stealing" intellectual property (something the US government has done in the past). It's building up nationalism to counter the rising inequality and scape-goat the issues onto China. While the people are distracted by the media with tales of intrigue and yellow peril, of a "genocide" in Xinjiang they will pay less attention to all that is going on at home from rising homelessness to the sinking of even mild social democrat reforms (ala Bernie), to BLM. BLM is especially of interest although not the underlying cause of this push, by making China out to be more brutal and downplaying US brutality they can still claim "at least we're not as bad as China".
They realize the position they are in and they are desperate. Trump is specifically pushing it because he's a racist nationalist who has to blame outsiders for being unfair but Democrats (including the much vaunted AOC) are quite on-board with the anti-China stuff and you'll see, they'll surprise you by working hand in hand with Republicans just like in the cold war to crush the left and build up a villain narrative against China.
People like to talk about the great firewall of China. The day a fourth of China can speak English and is unleashed on the US internet is the day the US would build our own great firewall to keep them and their opinions out. Same thing with surveillance, they like talking about Chinese surveillance but the US is second to none and getting more bold. I predict an attempt to make encryption economically untenable for all large companies to maintain (by withdrawing safe harbor) will pass within the next 5-10 years. I expect further measures of censorship against "disinformation" to be pushed by the US government and accepted and implemented by private companies. Anyone who posts counter-narratives against the US propaganda may very well be silenced in multiple ways.
something I've found worthwhile to point out, too, is that all the US companies steal ungodly amounts of data from us. The Chinese internet still has facebook/twitter analogues, China just built their own platforms instead of selling out their people to US private companies. Yes, this results in Chinese people being sheltered from US opinions, but honestly I can't entirely see that as a bad thing, considering how horrific the US internet is already.
The US has realized that they severely fucked up by allowing China to gain such a large dominance in manufacturing and the world economy in general. They are now scrambling to oppose China in any way possible. They're likely never gonna try to go into a direct war with China, but they are almost certainly trying to build a multi-country coalition to oppose China's growing global influence. Whatever move they make next, they are putting the propaganda machine into high gear so that their citizens and citizens of other countries are willing to go along with whatever comes next.
the multi-country coalition is the first world and they already built it
Maybe, but they have to get other "first world" countries on board with attempting to economically oppose China, which would be an extremely painful endeavour for any country. We've already seen the EU decide to continue to get closer to China economically, despite America urging them not to. Even now, Australia is showing some apprehension to the idea of joining America's "anti-china league." First and foremost, these countries care about their material interests, so as long as China appears non-threatening enough to them, they have a lot more incentive to stick close to them economically than to cave to US interests.
Do you believe that the growing economic power of China will cause a contradiction to emerge in the national bourgeoisie of the first world? It does seem evident that this is happening
Ultimately the bourgeoisie of each "first world" country are acting in what they believe to be their best interests (no surprise there.) Most nations that aren't the US have made the assessment that China is unlikely to pose any large threat to them any time soon, even if they gain more economic dominance globally. The reason we see the American bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie of other nations acting in a way that is contradictory to each other is because the American bourgeoisie have something to lose if there is an economic "changing of the guard" from the US to China, whereas the bourgeoisie of other first-world nations would be relatively unphased by the transition.
I think the only one they might get to go along relatively easily is the UK, because they seem pretty desperate to be the US' good lap dog, so that the US in exchange is nice to them in the future when it comes to trade deals and all that.
What if, hear me out, the Anglosphere Boys got together for one last job?..
Hi, I'm new here, and have seen a few puzzling posts, so I'm curious about the community's take on China's treatment of the Uighur people. I believe I understand the distrust in national discourse that might push us toward another (cold)war, but what makes you think "the Uighur camps are seriously overblown"? It certainly seems pretty serious, and it's not just the US government that believes so: https://www.npr.org/2020/07/04/887239225/china-suppression-of-uighur-minorities-meets-u-n-definition-of-genocide-report-s
You obviously did not look at any of the numerous posts here debunking the accusations made against China on the treatment of Uighurs in Xinjiang, especially those from the one main source on all of this. Otherwise, you would've known that Adrian Zenz, a German Christian fundamentalist, supposed China expert who can't even speak Mandarin is a bad source at best.
For good measure though, here is a really concise Youtube video going over all of the claims made, if textposts are too much to read.
Its to deflect from the real camps in the US. Its always projection from their own misbehavior
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URhrRd4ag38
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcNXI5DSFbA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glpE_m8OE2A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMKrFfSuNcc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NI6edfAdZI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJVqs_mhOA4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79cd6kJIOU0
It's just to redirect anger at China. The US is in chaos but if white suburban people can be mad at China then they don't have to reckon with how shitty things are here. Maybe in the long term it's to promote divestment but I'd even doubt the feds could pull that together. Regardless its definitely being astroturfed on Reddit.
“My 80 year old father is drowning in his own blood in an overcrowded hospital, but man I’m really worried about my kid posting on that damn tiktok”
This makes perfect sense -- in the reactionary mind, elderly relatives are either a burden or an obstacle to inheritance, and you can never run out of trivial shit to demonize the youths over.
They brainwashing liberals to reflexively hate China like they reflexively hated the Soviet Union, without any afterthought or reasoning.
Its working also, with the helps of Trots, Anarchists and Leftcoms who all agree DAE le China Bad??!!
Seems to be a buildup to a new Cold War or possibly a 'hot' one.
I think you're really overestimating the influence of Trots, Anarchists and Leftcoms if you think their opinion of China is more than a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the narrative that the MSM is putting forward. Especially since those leftist voices are, from what I've seen, saying that sure China is bad, but not for the reasons the media is saying, and the US is probably worse.
It assists the narrative by criticizing China "from the Left", but to be clear there is no Anti-Communist Left, they just other shades of liberal.
Yeah we can chill in our corner of the internet and (sometimes) have more nuanced conversations about what China is up to, but in means nothing to the propaganda machine. The only way that could be opposed is by an organized group, not a bunch of random online posters (even if there are hundreds of thousands of them)
Just blaming them for their own actions. Go to any of their subs on reddit. And MLs do not consider them to be part of "the Left" because they 99% also Anti-Communists.
Anarchists are cool most of the time, just not when they send me links to The Economist to support their anti-China views.
I've honestly found everyone I've talked to in person about it to be very receptive of my takes. Like I know a few hopeless upper middle class sucdems who are swallowing the propaganda hook line and sinker, but idk I do think we tend to put a lot of weight on the astroturfing we see and the opinions of petite bourgeois. Working class people I interact with have mostly been "I don't know shit about China" and generally listen when I talk about all the sources and stuff I've read about it. Maybe that's a unique experience, dunno, but it's been mine. However still it's not like there's hordes of people dedicated to combating the propaganda, so we'll see.
It's definitely evidence that the supremacy of the IMF and US imperial control is waning.
Just as sidenote, maybe if one is in such a discussion it might not be bad to slide in how the media was banging on the war-drums, uncritically regurgitating the WMD lies.
Just to remind them that the media has made horrific misjudgments, if you want to give them the benefit of the doubt.This has fortunately been my experience, too. The material reality of it is that most of the bits of productive industry we have left source loads of what they need from China and even the chuds know that's what's putting food on the table. I worked a warehouse job moving what I eventually found out were off the shelf components for navy shit (and left when that realization happened lol) and I was literally relabeling boxes straight from southern China it was hilarious. Trade relationships can of course change but I don't know if the rest of the world has the industrial capacity to feed the glutton that is the American economy if we cut out China.
Obviously the US and the western powers generally feel threatened by China and as a result are going to drum up anti-Chinese sentiment as much as possible.
However that doesn't make China good or socialist. They're just competing with western capitalism is all
It makes me wonder if America/The West would enter a suicidal holy war to try and defend capitalism/their imperial domination of the world.
The answer is a resounding yes.
Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism did a good job of convincing me that finance capital and imperialism inherently draw Great Powers into world war.
I haven’t read The Long Twentieth Century by Arrighi but I have seen some summaries of it, and he posits that periods of time during which one hegemonic empire is in decline and another is rising are usually marked by globe-spanning destructive wars - WWI/II while Britain was declining and US was rising, Napoleonic wars when the Dutch Empire was declining and the brits were on the way up, War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War as the Spanish empire was fading, etc. etc.
and of course leave it to the USSR to let their dissolution happen peacefully in the end
Aren't there quite a lot of those endtime christians, especially in the US, who believe in some holy war in the middle east, which will lead to the rapture or some shit like that?
Yeh, it’s why right wing Christian freaks in the US are all Zionists - they don’t actually care about Jews, but their end time prophecy requires a jewish state in the holy land or some shite
The US has entered the cool zone, don't expect foreign policy to make sense anymore, the country is literally ruled by a group of rapacious oligarchs and plutocrats that view war as an economic investment and job creator. The figure head of the country is a fool who has no concept of right or wrong, its exactly the right situation for bad historical shit to happen.
I mean, Zenz literally wrote a book about Capitalism being analogous to God and the death of global capital bringing about the end times. So quite literally yes. This propaganda is about capitalism being holy.
It’s very interesting, it represents quite a pivot by our ruling class who have been pretty happy to go along with the idea we are entering the “Chinese century” until now. I’d honestly thought it was more likely we’d slowly transition from an American aligned middle power to a Chinese aligned one, as we transitioned from a British imperial subject to an american one in the middle of the 20th century. But the political class and the media have definitely been pumping out plenty of anti-China propaganda lately.
This shift to me is evidence that China actually is serious in its Marxism. If it was capitalist like we've been told, the ruling class would find refuge there. They wouldn't be threatened by it.
There's no other explanation in my mind for the wild and bipartisan anti-China sentiment. The bourgeoisie are scared because they've destroyed any goodwill they could have in almost every nation on earth, and one of the last places they could implement neoliberal looting is actively hostile towards them.
I like your materialist view of the situation, I would counter (somewhat playing devil’s advocate here) that it is historically the case that bourgeoisie of different nations/empires compete internationally for access to markets. Even if China was a purely capitalist power it wouldn’t be bucking a trend if western bourgeois interestS united against it.
That's a good point, I guess Eastern and Western bourgeoisie have different interests due to competition. The UK and US are more similar to each other.
Xi Jinping has reversed a shitton of the Dengist liberalizations
People joke about China becoming Communist "any day now", but I think Xichas actually taken some steps towards not only economic reforms that help the workers, but also cultural reforms that make China a more hospitable place for non-chinese workers. There's still a ton of nationalism, but that can't be fixed in a day. Everyone knows that. At least they're trying though.
Someone on the Sino subreddit linked to a Chinese rap contest where the top 2 contestants were both Uyghur muslims. Which I think is a great way to try and shift the public opinion from negative to positive. Like they're actually trying to incorporate Uyghur culture without making them an "other". It's a very hard beam to balance on.
If this trend continues, China will be a pretty awesome place for inclusivity and worker rights sooner rather than later.
Edit: for some reason that Uyghir rap video is tagged as "sensitive content" by Twitter.
Chinese rap contest where the top 2 contestants were both Uyghur muslims.
That is slave labor, they are forced to perform there, you can see how he hates it.
Lol that's what I would've said if I'd be a lib. But in all honesty that is pretty dope, I have to look into chinese hip hop.
There’s no other explanation in my mind for the wild and bipartisan anti-China sentiment.
Could also be:
- Garden variety racism, or
- A need to demonize leftism in the face of a sustained capitalist economic crisis.
Probably some mix of all of the above.
This is far beyond garden variety racism. You don't AstroTurf racism this hard, Americans kinda just do that on their own (and already were). Linking China with "Antifa terrorists" is a good way for them to justify massive political arrests at home though. There's a lot of shit going on. This is just going to open a lot of shit up on a lot of different fronts.
You don’t AstroTurf racism this hard, Americans kinda just do that on their own (and already were).
Yeah, I did a piss-poor job of explaining what I meant. My thinking is that if there was a white replacement capitalist hegemon (say the EU was becoming the economic superpower China is) that would be easy for American capitalists to accommodate. But some evil Oriental replacement hegemon? Even if it's capitalist, all the white supremacy baked into American society makes that a tougher pill to swallow. It's an alternate explanation that fits even if China isn't actually anti-capitalist.
That's definitely more clear, racism is just the a topping on the capitalist, imperialist, hegemonic neapolitan.
If you remember the WMD situation than it's not hard to see what is happening in regards towards the anti-propaganda towards China. They have a war drum to beat.
I agree somewhat - critique everything people, a dialectical framework is key and the best thing for intellectual development - and I really try to not sound too optimistic about China. However I think that it's convenient for us Westerners to say picking a side is foolish. I imagine talking to any comrade in the Middle East or Africa, the choice between supporting the US or supporting China as the global hegemon is no choice at all. China's noninterventionistic tendencies are certainly better for the international proletarian movement
