China, as it always has, and not uniquely, will prove to be its own worst enemy.
A big part of that is captured in the inherently myopic insistence on advancing the Disney-fied version of what China is... as that prevents China from seeing, acknowledging, or accepting it has those self-inflected problems it denies exist. China often proceeds while "wishing away" the obvious, like Oz's Wizard, simply directing people they must not notice or comment on glaring "can't get there from here" flaws... and yet reality is always insistently intolerant of that brand of wishful thinking.
Otherwise, beyond an particularly insufferable brand of hubris, most of the rest of China's engagement with the world is not much different than others. As different as people are... they have far more in common than that which defines the differences. Corruption, violence, oppression, threats, intimidation, coercion, bullying... even genocide... are hardly Chinese innovations ? China does nothing in Tibet that Russia does not do in Belarus... nor anything in threatening its neighbors that Russia does not do in threatening Finland or Sweden, or Ukraine ? What China does in Xinjiang is more unique... but unworthy of a civilized people.
One of those things China does have in common with the rest of the world, now... is that it is entirely captured by and spectacularly conflicted by... three aspects of western thinking... two political, and one practical.
The practical is in the practical aspects of the scientific and engineering revolutions that now dominate the world... but which narrowly focused forms of thought cannot be divorced from the ideas that enable them.
The political adoptions are in the entwined conflicts inherent in western thinking about politics... dividing the world into competing interests based on varying degrees in adoption of communist or capitalist ideas... and in parallel the diametrically opposite systems of belief in relation to a proper focus on individuals or the state as the "unit" of organization.
China didn't invent communism... or capitalism... or national socialism... or the foundational basis of western scientific belief... but it has imported them... to no greater benefit in degree than any others. That there is a benefit in doing so... in some more than others... is obviously true. That the benefits can be won without other conflict being viral and genetically entrained... is obviously false.
What China is, or was, before those imports transformed China... first destroying it, then resurrecting it... was and is culturally unique and valuable... but it shares with the rest of the world fundamental origins that have always been balanced, more or less well at different times, between "conduct of business" and "putting up with the morons who run things". China has a longer legacy and more of a cultural history of submission to the morons who run things... than many other places.
That's an inherently poor use of the word "longer" though... as in the span of maybe 25,000 years of knowable human history... it is of a part with the vast majority that is recorded, and that which is archaeologically decipherable. The difference we're discussing is only hundreds of years old anywhere.
It is only since "The Enlightenment" that Europe partially emerged from essentially the same cultural miasma. Europeans, today, still share it more than Americans. The modern view of it has been that the Dark Ages were dark... because they had lost the light of... being controlled as vassals of the Roman Empire ? A more enlightened view... might note that while Rome was certainly successful in creating a dominant culture and an empire... whether seen in the biblical or historical accounts, or in Russell Crows presentation of one man's view of that experience in "The Gladiator"... nothing suggests that "Empire" was not at least equally as dark... unenlightened... as "The Dark Ages"...
The west led the rest of the world out of that long darkness, not out of "the Dark Ages"... but out of the >25,000 year long cultural darkness that was all that was before. But, that task is obviously incomplete... perhaps not least in the west... making the use of the word "led" also particularly questionable... "partially stumbled out of the darkness, first"... perhaps a better description. Musical interlude. Lyrics. Immediately rushing back into the presumed greater safety of the familiar darkness is also not a uniquely western response to "enlightenment"... or "to being exposed and thus seen"...
The west's own experience of the transitions occurring in a reordering of society... based on accepting and adopting revolutionary new understandings only in part... were so conflicted that they produced both communism and capitalism as competing half measures insistently justifying retaining the worst elements of the cultural legacy of absolute monarchy that the new understanding obviates as irrational and irrelevant...
That some of the world still has monarchs... with most of the rest of the world split between competing camps adopting variations on "monarchy by committee"... doesn't provide a lot of reason for optimism.
Odds are pretty good "The Enlightenment" is nearing its end... one might think.
But, we'll see... the error apparent in failing to understand the nature of the change in new ideas fully enough... that failing in intellect that fosters the conflict... is persistent. But the conflict persisting leaves room for hope... that those seeking to restore an expanded global domination over all the world's people by "proper government"... without ever agreeing what that is, means, requires... it might well fail... probably will.
Liberty was enabled in Hong Kong almost by accident... but far more it was enabled in surviving by a properly applied and sufficient amount of well managed neglect... generating an ideally disciplined chaos.
It survives still, and is only growing more ardent in Taiwan... as tyrants threatening rarely works otherwise.
Texas and Idaho and Montana, Florida and Alabama, remain very much unlike New York or California... and will not go gentle into that same evil in the darkness now causing New York and California to fail...
Even if London is fully national socialist, and lost, again, even as it was already lost to the globalist bankers and to an apparently genetic attachment to the idea of Monarchy, "real" or "alternative"... which can no long sustain pretense in the claim to be enlightened? India persists as a source of hope in a perhaps better image of the same thing in reflection, with the experience of colonization removing residual monarchical instincts. It appears Australia has seen the light...fully recognizing a lack of value in the bribe offered... even if only because of the ham-fisted nature of the accompanying threats... Aussies always good in a bar fight.
Poland and Hungary... will not be going back... nor, probably, will Ukraine ever again willingly submit.
And, culturally, even the obviously ignorant hypocrisy of hopeless idiots like Jack Dorsey at Twitter... gladly as corrupt as "necessary" when tyranny is required in suppressing speech he disagrees with at home... is still quick to recognize and condemn that same behavior in others when he sees it... blind to the irony.
I remember, as a kid, watching as "Freedom Flights" arrived from Havana... meeting those escaping from Castro's Cuba to find freedom in America... expressive about being liberated... about being free...
I don't for a minute believe that the people in China are inferior to Cubans in being somehow incapable of expressing themselves similarly...
They clearly have been heard in Hong Kong...
That they can no longer be heard there... is the clearest definition in sharpest contrast of that defectiveness in thinking that rules China today... far more than it rules elsewhere.
That China new king is intolerant of criticism... as well as intolerant of the Uighur's culture and religion, and the Mongolian culture and language... and is threatened by the Falun Gong's adoption of obvious and universal human principles... all additive proofs of China being INCREASINGLY unenlightened...
In the race to return to the dark ages... China is clearly ahead... lagging only North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran...
That China has reversed path on reforms, and surrendered like North Korea and Venezuela to being ruled by another clueless idiot king ? I see no reason for optimism in China... unless "better than North Korea" is the standard applied. "Inertia" slowing the rate of decline... a benefit... and with luck Xi and his legacy won't live too long.
That Chinese are not informed, or not allowed to discuss the resulting reversals... doesn't alter the reality or change results.
So, for now, Jack Ma's Business School awaits the return of the enlightenment... and we are embarrassed for China, again, only the more as they refuse to be embarrassed... and decide instead, like Sacha Cohen, to pretend it doesn't matter... even if the result is less entertaining. |
