October 03, 2019
He doesn't say it, but let's greatly hope we don't fall asleep again in 2020 and Trump doesn't get beat at the polls. Meanwhile, please go here https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/victor-davis-hanson-china-woke-america to read VDH -- always an exhilarating experience.In these times of near civil war, Americans agree on almost nothing. Yet sometime in 2019, almost all of America finally got "woke†on China.
For years, our leaders had yawned about Silk Road neo-imperialism in Africa and Asia, and gross abuses of human rights against Chinese religious minorities and political dissidents.
Almost every assumption Washington made, both by Democratic and Republican administrations, was logically flawed at best. And at worst, these calculations were a weird mix of conservative commercial greed, liberal political correctness and shared screwball naiveté.
American trade and political appeasement were never interpreted by Beijing as magnanimity to be reciprocated, but always as weakness to be exploited. It was always ludicrous to think that the more concessions on trade and human rights the United States gave, the more China would Westernize and begin to resemble America or a European Union nation.
Even sillier was the old shibboleth that China’s embrace of capitalist reforms — as if by some unwritten, determinist economic law — would lead to constitutional government. But the ability to buy a new cellphone never ensures the right to vote for a candidate of one’s choice.
Instead, all China did was auction off large sections of its new and more efficient economy to crony communist pseudo-capitalists and corrupt provincial officials in order to modernize the country, beef up the military, warp the international trading system — and make itself very rich.
Why did America act in such a suicidal way on China?
Cheap Chinese labor and lax American laws motivated hundreds of U.S. corporations to shut down their domestic assembly plants and relocate to China. At least at first, they were free to pay substandard wages and were mostly unregulated.
Once American businesses got hooked on mega-profits, the Chinese government slowly started stealing their technology, infringing on copyrights and patents, dumping their own merchandise on the world market at prices below production costs, running up huge trade surpluses and manipulating their currency.
But by then, American corporations were so addicted to laissez-faire profitmaking that they turned a blind eye and paid their hush money.
Universities cashed in too, both by setting up lucrative satellite campuses in China and admitting tens of thousands of Chinese citizens. These Chinese students paid full tuition (and sometimes premiums and surcharges), turning once cash-strapped campuses into profitable degree mills.
[...]
What finally woke America up were two unforeseen developments.
First, the Chinese overreached and systematically began militarizing neutral islands in the South China Sea. They derided international commercial treaties.
In racist fashion, they treated Asian and African countries as if they were 19th-centurycolonies. And they unapologetically lifted technology from America’s biggest and most powerful corporations to turn China into something akin to George Orwell’s "1984.â€
Meanwhile, Beijing began rounding up dissidents, cracking down in Hong Kong and "re-educating†millions of Muslims in detention camps. All that brazenness finally drove the left to drop its multicultural blinders and accept the truth of renegade Chinese oppression.
Second, Donald Trump got elected president, all the while screaming that the Chinese emperor had no clothes. The cheerleaders finally listened and admitted that China had been buck naked after all.
Now we will learn whether America woke up just in time or too late. Either way, no one will credit the loud Trump for warning that China was threatening not just the U.S. but the world as we have known it.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
06:35 PM
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Voting for the candidate of one's choice is vastly overrated. What has it done for this nation? It has gotten us the likes of George W. and Barack Obama. At the last election we had a choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. What has the federal government done lately that the voting public wanted done? In the upcoming election it will very possibly turn this country into a socialist state.
A nation governed by a uninformed and totally self interested public is doomed to self destruction.
Posted by: Bill H at October 03, 2019 11:38 PM (vMiSr)
First, he's so right about the terribly flawed notion that China would reform after engaging economically with the West. The Neocons who promoted this notion forgot that Russia did the exact same thing under V.I. Lenin, who instituted what he called his "New Economic Program" after attempts at collectivizing the economy failed. It was under the NEP that the Kulaks flourished. When Stalin came along he decided it was time to move the revolution along - and he destroyed the Kulaks. He took all the grain out of the Ukraine and the artificial famine killed millions. But it was inevitable; the Communissts had no intention of ever surrendering power to the People or to anyone else.
China was and is no different.
Their so-called capitalism is anything but; it is more a version of corporatism practiced by Nazi Germany. But it looks capitalistic solely because WE are no longer capittalists, but practice a version of the same corporatism. As Chesterton observed, a capitalist is a communist with a bigger paycheck. That's where we are now.
A second point; China has instituted what it calls it's "social credit system" which is not just a way to shame people who don't obey them but to erase them from existence. Unfortunately it dovetails exactly with the attitudes of the modern American Left, who is busily instituting many of the same policies. Just look at Google and Facebook.
China was and is our enemy. They were too polite to say it to our face, and we were too stupid to figure it out. I said when the Cold War eneded that it really wasn't over until Chinese communism was beaten, but too many people wanted to reap the "peace dividentd" fruits. And bear in mind, China was thick as thieves with Bill Clinton; remember Charlie Trie and the whole Chinese campaign cash scandal? The Loral Aerospace thing? They wouldn't be a superpower today had we not given them that status. We created this monster.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at October 04, 2019 07:14 AM (LQaGN)
And we have not had an opposition party in the GOP. They have followed along with this for decades, largely because they feared the power of the electronic press, which lies as brazenly as Lucifer himself.
I will say this in disagreement, though; America at least still pays lip service - and has the remaining trappings - to the old order. China is a totalitarian state and does not even bother with pretending. There is no chance of China reforming. There is still a chance, however dim, of Americans waking up and fixing this mess. I don't think it will happen, but it is there. It can''t happen in China, not without outside intervention. Divine intervention, really.
I'm not saying we should go to war with China to free the peasants, not at all. I am saying we can help, though, through much of what Trump is doing now; squeezing them economically, just as Reagan did to the U.S.S.R. In the end both are marxist states and their achilles heel is their command economies and strict absolutist control
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at October 04, 2019 07:26 AM (LQaGN)
But having the right to vote for a candidate of your choice is precious, nevertheless. If you don't think so, I suggest you try living somewhere that doesn't afford you that right. Or a place that picks the candidates for you.
Posted by: Dana Mathewson at October 04, 2019 11:14 AM (RnR2D)
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