The 'American Century' is over, but Americans cannot accept the fact that they - 5% of the world's population - cannot rule the other 95% forever. American entitlement and hubris are causing many to lash out and embark on a path that is perilous both to themselves and the world.
Incongruent Fear and Loathing
Let's take a look at some illogical American talking points used in the smear campaign against China:
"China is going to collapse soon!"If Americans really believed this, they would sit back, smile and ignore China.
"China is going to take over the world!"This paranoid warning usually follows the delusional, "China will collapse" claim. Make up your mind!
"Our free market is the best and China is communist!"Americans conveniently forget that the US government subsidizes farmers, Big Pharma and the military-industrial-complex with hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Also, when developing nations subsidize Western corporations, it's applauded as smart business; but when developing nations help their domestic firms, it's vilified as socialism or communism.
What's even more interesting is that China now has more publicly traded companies than the US! There's more competition in "communist" China than in the "capitalist" US. For example, the US has one smartphone company (Apple), while China has Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, ZTE, OnePlus, Transsion, etc.
Finally, comparing the economic growth of the US and China over the last four decades, no one can reasonably say that the US is superior to the China model:
"China isn't open! It discriminates against US corporations!"This is often accompanied by, "We should decouple from China!" This 'logic' hurts the brain.
Also, while demanding that China treat American companies just like Chinese companies, the US has placed 140 Chinese companies under the "entity list," meaning they can't do business with US corporations or the government.
"China censors Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc."This is followed by, "OMG! There are Chinese bots and trolls flooding our social media. Ban them, please!"
"China steals everything"China has been #1 in both scientific publications and patents for the last few years. Why? China spends $300 billion a year on R&D and graduates 8 times as many STEM graduates as the US. Chinese companies like Huawei, Alibaba and SenseTime are leapfrogging over the US in AI software, AI chips, database software, 5G etc. And young Chinese people have the "9-9-6" work ethic - they work 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week.
Well, it's like sports where partisan supporters are certain that the other team won only by cheating.
"China forced US corporations into technology transfer"In exchange for technology, China offered generous subsidies and tax cuts that allowed US corporations to make trillions of dollars over the last 40 years. To put it succinctly: China bought the technology from American, European, Japanese and Korean companies. Americans didn't mind the technology transfer, because they never thought that China could compete - after all, China merely employs slave labor to make crappy products, right?
"China is a totalitarian government! We are so amazing because we have Democracy!"Democracy in America is a joke. As Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of the World Bank said, "America is of the 1%, by the 1% and for the 1%."
The Chinese government is based on meritocracy and has a 90% approval rate. While it's not perfect, it has done a remarkable job in the last 40 years by lifting 800 million people out of poverty and creating the world's largest middle class.
Also, note that the US never tries to spread democracy in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, etc. 'Freedom and democracy' propaganda is a selective tool, not anchored to any consistent values or principles worthy of being called such.
Atrocity Propaganda
Like "Saddam threw babies out of incubators" or "Assad uses chemical weapons," the US started the "1 million Chinese Muslims in concentration camps" narrative in early 2018. While hundreds of diplomats and journalists from all over the world have visited these re-education camps in Xinjiang, the US establishment sticks to its pathetic atrocity propaganda.
When that desperate narrative fizzled out, whoever is responsible for conducting psy-ops in Washington DC restarted the "organ-harvesting" fake news with the help of Falun Gong and the World Uyghur Congress, both of which are funded by the US.
No matter how absurd or sensationalist, it's never a "conspiracy theory" when it's about China, Russia, Iran or any other geopolitical competitor.
Racism and Yellow Peril
Behind all this anti-China propaganda is deep-seated racism in Americans that cannot accept the Chinese as equals. If confronted about racism, Americans would say, "I only hate the Chinese government, not the people." However, this is clearly disproved by how Americans behave on social media, where any article that's negative about China instantly goes viral; and positive news about China gets ignored or even downvoted.
'Yellow Peril syndrome' is deeper among those in the US establishment. The right-wing is more blatant and sensational: "The Chinese aren't smarter. They CHEAT," tweeted Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. A US State Department official said, "It's the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian." The FBI Director upped the ante and called China a "whole-of-society threat." Like George Orwell's 'Two Minutes Hate', the US media and social media influencers — Kyle Bass, Gordon Chang, Charlie Kirk, General Rob Spalding etc. — spew insane anti-Chinese hatred every day to rile up the mob.
Censorship
As Rania Khalek pointed out, corporate media is filled with spooks and US government officials acting as "analysts." Sadly, social media giants are also acting as state propaganda outlets. Google, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Medium etc. are all actively purging pro-China voices, while tolerating what amounts to hate speech.
Nathan Rich - an American living in China - illustrated how YouTube actively worked against him. For example, his subscriber numbers would go down substantially, people could only dislike his videos but could not like them, his videos wouldn't show up in searches, etc. Twitter also purges pro-China people, but if there's a huge outcry - like when they deleted Carl Zha's account - the thought police would quietly reinstate a handful of the victims.
Anyone who's remotely pro-China on social media is vilified as a Chinese bot or a "Wumao" - a person who supposedly works for 50 cents/hour to spread Chinese propaganda.
On Reddit, there's a sub-group called "r/China" with 120,000 members. But you won't find anything positive or neutral about China in that group — it's a sewer of racism and hatred. And people who post positive news about China also get banned or attacked by online mobs.
From corporate media to social media, only one-sided sensational claims are allowed.
The concept of 'freedom of speech and expression' in the US is a farce.
Conclusion
The USA is exhibiting all the symptoms of late-stage capitalism or a dying empire — deep internal divisions, extreme wealth inequality, exploding debt, brainwashed masses, overextended military, and paranoia about geopolitical competition.
Meanwhile, China has a lot of room to grow, since its GDP-per-capita is still only $10,000 overall and $20,000 in big cities. China's strategy is to keep calm, maintain growth, expand trade, and become technologically independent by 2025 — especially in semiconductors. By 2030, China's nominal GDP will be larger than that of the US; and Asia will account for 40% of global GDP. If China can successfully navigate all the proxy and hybrid wars waged by belligerent America in the next decade, then China and Eurasia will be the shining stars of this century.
Reader Comments
I had faith but there's no faith when psychos rule and will forever rule until a reset brought on by cataclysm which will only break there power for a bit before they start infiltrating society again.
SOTTfolk, all: Please: reread Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, [Link]
From said book, (or, as Michael Rivero of WRH* puts it, 'The Book Within The Book'): *What Really Happened dot com. Back then - say the mid 90's? - he was still trying to remain anonymous. But he learned there was no such anonymity when he completely lost his jobs doing special effects in Hollywood DIRECTLY from forming WRH. (Of course, the bastards tried to buy him out early...but failed.) I admire him as I admire LKJ.
RC
I gather that this was always the "plan" as directed by our wonderful alien overlord project managers. Chinese are apparently genetically better suited to being ruled by the "long-pig" (human) farmers.
China's population has been graced with that magical perfect mix of service-to-self behavior AND mob mentality:
Did you know that something as socially graceful and healthy, (and unique to humans) as lining up for a movie ticket , -or at a bus stop or at a lunch stand, is a social convention beyond the ken of enough Chinese as to make it a national embarrassment?
From one of many little descriptions available: Well, that sounds like a marvelously evolved social structure separated from barnyard animals, doesn't it? A fine example of the Neo Cortex in full use!
Social bullying and jockeying for pecking order status is the norm among school-age children of any culture, but Chinese kids seem to apply the principle with obsessive severity. It's constant, low-level social warfare, and being at the bottom is both miserable and perilous.
On the other hand, while individuals don't trust or respect each other enough to even manage a basic civil line up, they are more than ready to give their trust and respect to any passing authority figure. If the state says "jump" (or work yourself to death building a giant infrastructure project), well, the Chinese citizen bloody well jumps. En masse! Nobody can build mega projects like the Chinese! One of Elon Musk's China based giga-factories, which would have taken an estimated 3-5 years to be build in the West only takes about 6 months in China. -From breaking soil in a swampy field to shoproom ready Teslas rolling off the assembly line! [Link]
Corruption is the rule in state politics and civic institutions. Obviously. If you can't bring yourself to line up for a bus, then your expectation for fair treatment anywhere else is going to be non-existent. There is a craving in humans to be treated fairly, and since there seems to be resistance to achieving this it at the level of personal responsibility, the Chinese seek it from their government. Maybe that's why China was so enthusiastically drawn to socialism.
And similarly, perhaps this is why they were so easily sold the digital social credit system, whereas in the West it had to be introduced with much greater care and craft. The farmer's work is much easier when they don't have to constantly play mind games to get the flock to do as it is told.
If we want to understand why an alien manager would want to establish Chinese global species domination, perhaps we need to look at what farmers prefer in their livestock:
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"As above, so below"
Just saying.
Pull Chinese people out of China, and drop them into the West a few at a time, and you end up with bright and insightful humans who are as individually valuable as the best. Leave them in China and that light has a much harder time shining through.
I think bodies have genetic inclinations, and it is up to the soul 'wearing' that body to override the detrimental elements and do the best it can with the material available. With the right environment, this is made easier or harder.
I can't see a 'Chinese led global order' though, although I may be wrong about that.
Then again, bees/ants/termites can't build cars...yet.
I first said this around the time it became apparent that I'd never be drafted into Vietnam.
It seems that we have reached a pinnacle of the benefits of society/technology (e.g., Air conditioning - without which Florida would revert to nearly its population back around 1901.)
Music.
Party supplies.
Presumption of innocence still existed.
Freedom - particularly, 'the right to be left alone' still existed.
Those are now distant memories.
By the time I was 15, I was akin to some biblical pessimistic prophet about the fact that it was PAINFULLY OBVIOUS that the natural end result of the War on Drugs would be the Police State AmeriKa. (And fools who would try to disagree would claim - oh, it's just a swing of the pendulum to the 'righht' when they SHOULD HAVE KNOWN of the critical, essential difference - and how many harmless, decent people have spent how many human lifetime years (to this very day) for smoking pot . . OR shooting up
heroinnay Drano! all of that has NEVER been government's business. (Why did the drug 'alcohol' require a CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT TO BAN and yet all the subsequent 'add ons' to prohibitiiion never required such.) Ultimately, the police state was sealed/achieved not long after the AmeriKan Idiots bought into believing the painfully obvious lies behind - and in front of - 9/11/2001's obvious ZOG-run Inside Job.Folks commonly speak to me aboout 'We made fun of your pessimism - but you were right.'
I grant that those americans who 'believed' in the 'official lie/story of 9/11/2001' has waned in the populace, but that took far, far too long and it feels that now it's day late and a dollar short.
And here we are. A sh*tty 'pecking order' indeed.
R.C.
Is China playing a "domination" game? They say they're 'win-win', 'multi-lateral cooperation', 'multipolar world', etc.
What actions of theirs would you say are evidence of "dominating"?
(And remember, the bar's been set by the USA, the current global hegemon: gargantuan military spending, hundreds of permanent military bases, hundreds more 'lily pad' military installations, a long string of illegal wars of aggression, multiple simultaneous proxy wars, foreign coups as a matter of routine, false-flag terrorism, financial terrorism (speculative attacks, 'structural loans', etc), gargantuan 'soft power' apparatus, global media domination...)
But then the Neocons took over, arranged an economic recession, got Bush defeated by their man Clinton, and 'Israel' got its Endless Wars.
The 'NWO' as most of us conceive it is about the prophesied ultimate 'slave planet' goal of hyperdimensional beings. I think things are still headed in that direction, but it's rare that leaders - certainly known, public figures - intend that outcome.
And I would argue that they played their hand very effectively in a long game kind of way, subsidizing the shipping of goods to the West at a loss in order to facilitate rapid growth and, indeed, domination in terms of goods trade. -If I want to sell an item to a customer over eBay, for instance, either I or the buyer must shell out in order to cover a steep postage charge. By contrast, the postage rate for buying an item originating in China is often either trivial or zero. Who wins? And what is somebody in the West going to sell on eBay anyway?
I grew up with Chinese kids, and as we got older, a common practice took place; parents would run factories back home, and they'd leave their kids by themselves in condos or houses while they returned to manage business affairs in China or Hong Kong. I was hanging out with a bunch of these guys one day, playing video games in a living room in one such house. One of them made a joke which everybody laughed at and which I didn't understand, so bugged him to explain it to me. I can't remember the phrasing, but it was something about the Red Sun casting a long shadow or something:
"What do you mean?"
He finally explained it to me, (somewhat sheepishly). "The Red Chinese Sun will eventually rise over the whole world and China will finally rule everything."
This was long ago, we were just kids and who knows if he was alone in his thinking. But that's exactly what transpired, three decades later. All the property in that section of the city, once owned by a bunch of doofy white Canadians is now nearly 100% Chinese. There are quarter million dollar sports cars in every fifth driveway. The only Caucasians walking around now are old folks with slightly alienated looks in their eyes as if to ask, "What happened?"
I don't know if Chinese leadership deliberately orchestrated things with this end in mind or if there was any mustache twirling evident, or if it's all just a tidy case of efficient livestock management from the next level up, but the proof of domination is in the pudding.
It's a world apart from imperial domination though.
I'm being facetious, of course. It doesn't matter what the 'leaders' intend. Most of them don't have any more conscious understanding of the ends they serve than you or I do. For the most part, we are all in pieces, with conflicting impulses. In some contexts, we serve progressive impulses, and in other contexts, destructive ones. Very few of us are integrated enough to consciously serve one set of impulses (actually beings) in everything we do. I suspect that people we identify as charismatic are ones who are more integrated than the average.
The west, and the US in particular will have to relate and trade with this group on equal terms. A tall order!
Reading that bit is already a breath of fresh air.
R.C.
USA doesn't want China's economy to fail. We want it to succeed. Lets do it together!
Duh!!!
Then there are joint Russian/Chinese plans in the commercial aviation sector to directly compete against Boeing & Airbus. Not to mention the Belt & Road initiative. Looks like the Chinese are just warming up. Murica had it's day, times are quickly changing.
We all know that Kalifornia economy is twice that of China ??
Don't you people watch CNNNBCCBCMSNBCBBCABC ???
R.C.
Yes, what a coincidence that the US big tech and left-wing politicians begins to mirror PRC policy as more and more Chinese permeate through our government and big tech. How come Democrat politicians can employ Chinese spies for decades, but if Trump makes a phone call...?!
And anyone who thinks Americans are racist ought to go live in China, you may find it enlightening to have some basis for comparison, people are generally more racist over there.
Jesus Christ, US has its major problems and fuck the CIA but the answer is not to bend over and let Xi and his bunch of authoritarian goons have their way around the world.
[Link]
So censorship would not be happening in the US if the US were not so 'exposed' to China?
What's the solution to this problem? Close doors?
Look up 'Open Door Policy'.
FWIW, my own read on it is that China's 'firewall' largely works to protect the country from the very 'ideological viruses' that the US and allies spread around the world, destroying much of it. Whereas censorship in the West is largely configured to maximize the damage wrought by these viruses by targeting (generally) conservative, sane voices.