#China existed before the CCP and it will exist after the CCP has gone from the earth | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

tanadrin · 5 years ago

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How /did/ things change after 2001? I was born in that year and everyone says it was different before, but I've never really gotten a sense of how.

It is difficult for me to emphasize just how different the world you see on the evening news is now, from what it was like before 2001, at least as I remember it. There’s a scene in Farscape, where after years of trying to get home, the astronaut protagonist John Crichton finally makes it back to Earth with his alien friends in tow, and when he’s reunited with his father, he’s shocked to discover his dad has gone from this optimistic, forward-looking, hopeful dreamer to a nervous, jingoistic conservative. His attitude is basically, “yes, there’s dangerous aliens out there who may or may not be trying to kill us--but the galaxy is a place full of wonders you’ve never dreamed of.” His father, in the meantime, has retreated from his hopes for a science-fiction future, and views his new alien friends with suspicion.

It’s not a subtle metaphor, but it’s true. The 90s--at least in the US, at least as I remember them--were a relentlessly optimistic period. Even if things were not yet at their ideal state, there was very much a sense they were heading there; politics was mostly down to what exact flavor of the neoliberal consensus you preferred, Clinton or Bush, and the international triumph of liberal democracy was either a fait accompli (cf. the erstwhile USSR), or just around the corner (cf. hopes for China’s liberalization in the wake of market reforms). Yes, in retrospect, this was kind of a dumb world view. If you actually lived in Russia in the 90s--to say nothing of the Balkans--it was a rough decade, and a lot of the relentless optimism of the period in the United States was down to the privileged position we viewed the world from.

The blunting of that optimism--the reminder that we were still embedded in history, and the final triumph of everything good and just was not foreordained--would not in itself have been a catastrophe. Terrorism was not a strange concept in the 90s, and even Al-Qaeda-style terrorism had its predecessors in attacks on American ships and embassies. 9/11 itself was confusing and chaotic and sad, but 9/11 wasn’t the catastrophe. The catastrophe came after, in how we responded.

I think something broke in America between 1945 and 1991. Something shifted, in a nasty way we didn't realize while we were occupied with communism and stagflation and the civil rights movement. I don't mean to say that America before 1945 was the Good Guys. But the American state and the American political class viewed the world with... humility? Like, sure, the can-do Yankee spirit before 1945 had its own special kind of arrogance (and greed, and hideous bigotry), but it still thought of the world in terms of obligations we owed other countries. By the time the Cold War ended, and the US was the sole remaining superpower, that wasn't how we viewed the world. It was still sort of how we told each other, and our children, what the world was like. We certainly talked a big game about democracy and human rights. But as soon as that principled stance was tested, we folded like a cheap suit. What we should have done after 9/11 was what we had done after every terrorist incident in or against the United States before then: treated it like the major crime it was, sent a civilian agency like the FBI in to investigate, and pursue the perpetrators diplomatically. What we did instead was treat it like the opening salvo of a war--in fact, invented a war to embed it within, to give ourselves narrative justification for that stance--and crank every element of paranoid jingoism instantly up to 11. It has never abated since.

Some of this is the little things. The TSA and the Department of Homeland Security--a name I thought was creepy Orwellian shit right from the get-go. The terror alert levels. (God! remember those?) The fact that airport security--despite being just as ineffective today as it was on September 12--is still routinely humiliating and invasive and just a total waste of everybody’s time. Some of it is the big things. The way security, and the need for security, trumps all other demands including the state’s obligation to protect civil rights. And the fact that this just isn’t even up for debate anymore. 9/11, as Chomsky presciently observed, was a boon for authoritarians everywhere. Suddenly, “counterterrorism” was the magic word that let you get away with anything, like “anti-communism” twenty years prior. At the most extreme end, this led to things like anti-atheism laws being promulgated in Saudi Arabia in the name of “counterterrorism,” but you don’t have to go that absurd to find ways in which the security state has fostered authoritarianism. In every aspect of our lives, this new, fearful outlook on the world justified a gradual ratcheting down of freedom, the gradual empowerment of petty tyrants everywhere, and the weak protests, fading into silence, of people who still believed in liberty as an important organizing principle for modern society. It wasn’t even that you’d get called a terrorist-sympathizer or anything that blatant. It just ceased to be regarded as important. It wasn’t that you were wrong, or misguided, or evil. You were just a non-serious person, someone whose opinion was clearly irrelevant, whose head was permanently in the clouds, if you thought that stuff still mattered. And that never went away.

And I think a big part of what changed between 1945 and 1991 was that the US started to believe its own jingoism. When did this start? Vietnam? Earlier? Korea? I don’t know. It’s hard to pinpoint, given that my understanding of the cultural zeitgeist of the decades before I was born mostly came from my dad’s old Doonesbury collections. I don’t know how to describe what we became--what we, hideously, revealed ourselves to be--except as a kind of machismo. A kind of ruthless, General Ripper-esque us-versus-them psychosis that gripped us where the Soviets were concerned, and never let up. And we still believe it. It still infects every atom of our political discourse. We don’t question the necessity of drone strikes, only who to drone strike and how much. We don’t really question the massive powers we’ve afforded the executive branch to wage war and conduct espionage--including kidnappings and torture--and we’ve kind of forgotten that we still have a prison camp in Cuba full of people who have never been convincted of any crime. In a way, we lost faith in law entirely: by God, we couldn’t try terrorists in American courts! (Why not? What’s wrong with American courts? Don’t we have faith in our own laws, at least?) No, justice wasn’t a matter for the law to decide anymore. Justice was a matter for the military only: justice came in the form of strength of arms. Ergo, shooting Bin Laden in the head and calling that justice; ergo, Jack Bauer; ergo, blowing up Yemeni weddings. Keep America Safe. I can’t begin to tell you how alienating and horrifying so much of the last 20 years has been, if the most consequential news stories of your childhood were the OJ Simpson murders and a discussion of the President’s cum stain.

In my opinion, the seminal text of the post-9/11 world was released in the year 2000. In the original Deus Ex video game, the year is 2150, and the world is a dark, depressing place. You, the game’s hero, work (initally) for a UN counterterrorism agency while a plague ravages the world. You hunt terrorists whose existence has provided the justification for an authoritarian crackdown on dissidents everywhere. You visit a Hong Kong firmly under the control of the CCP, you fight genetically engineered mutants created by huge businesses run amok, FEMA (no DHS then) controls the federal government, and, it turns out later in the game, the bombing of the Statue of Liberty that precipitated the creation of your organization was a false-flag attack used to justify its existence in the first place. Drones patrol the streets of NYC, and the whole thing is steeped in late-90s militia movement-style conspiracy theories about the Illuminati and the New World Order, that look weirdly out of place now that these things are more clearly aligned in the popular consciousness with right wing extremism, when back then they were just seen as kooky weirdos in Montana--but every year since then, we’ve been inching closer and closer to that world, and you know what? It wigs me out a little.

In 2000, Deus Ex was an absurdity, a fever dream of cyberpunk and early-internet conspiracism. It’s a shame that tonally speaking it’s been dead on for the two decades after. But honestly, I think the biggest thing that’s changed about the world since 2001 is our cultural capacity for optimism. I don’t mean in a sentimental way--although if you compare other texts heavily influenced by the post-2001 political milieu, you definitely see a sharp contrast with the optimism of cultural artifacts from earlier eras; science fiction was hit especially hard in this area (cf. RDM’s version of Battlestar Galactica). But I also mean this in a political/ideological sense. We cease to imagine that the world can be made better. We cease to imagine the possibilities that are afforded to us if we are willing to strive for our ideal society, even if we, personally, may never reach it. We make deals with the devil, we let the CIA violate the constitution and federal law six ways from Sunday, we don’t question the prevailing political-economic consensus even if it’s setting the planet on fire and pitching us headlong toward social disaster, because we forgot what it was to feel like those sunlit uplands we’ve been hoping for were just around the corner.

In the same way that my Catholic faith was eventually done in because the ethical principles I was taught were at odds with the manifest monstrosity of the organization that taught them to me and the metaphysics it espoused, my patriotism and my faith in America was done in because when I was a schoolkid, I really did believe that democracy and human rights and equality under the law were important. Some people probably had their illusions--if they ever had any--about the US government stripped away long ago, but I was a white kid from a reasonably prosperous part of town, so it took until the 2000s and my growing political awareness to realize just how flimsy these principles were when they were put to any kind of test. It made me angry; it still makes me angry. I was raised to believe there are some principles that are important enough that you don’t compromise them ever, no matter how scared or worried you are. Just as I was old enough to understand what was going on on the evening news, the United States betrayed everything I had been taught the United States stood for. And as a nation, we never turned back; we never apologized; we never repented. America, as an abstract entity, never was what I thought it was as a kid. But I think it could still become that, if it tried. Alas, very few people seem to believe such a thing is possible anymore. Most days, I’m not sure I do, either.

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evilelitest2 · 4 years ago

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How did China become the way it is now? They went from dynasties to a communist dictatorship that targets Uighurs?

Well i will say, the Qing Dynasty (last dynasty of China) also did a lot of genocides against Nomadic non Han peoples on the frontier provinces (Despite being a non Han steppe dynasty themselves) , like China has a long history of that sort of thing. But to answer your main question, this is really complicated but i’ll try to reduce it down to a few steps

Step one: The Qing Dynasty, last Imperial Dynasty of China, is chilling out being the Imperial power when the British Empire, in their endless addiction TEA basically gets a ton of the nation addicted to opium to force China to Trade with them, cementing their role as history more aggressive drug dealer. When china is like “hey we don’t want to do discount heroin” Britain launches a series of “Opium wars” where they destroy the Qing army and force them to basically a accept these unequal treaties where Britain and the other European powers could basically run sections of most of the Chinese coastal cities, were immune to Chinese law, take Hong Kong for themselves (different story) and force China to enter unequal trade treaties.

Step 2: In part to response to this, an unorthodox Christian sect starts a massive Revolution/Civil war called the Taiping Rebellion, which has the “FUN” distinction of being one of the most bloody war in human history...ever. up to 30 million people die. Remember this is happening at the same time as the American Civil War, whose highest death count only gets up to 1 million. This does massive damage to Qing China, even though they win the war, and makes them super hostile to Christianity and western adaptations.

Step 3:Japan, who is going through their own period of Modernization, decides the best way to reject Western Imperialism is to Imperalize Korea. This leads to the First Sino Japanese War in 1895, who defeat China and start to take over chinese territory. They take even more when they win the Russo Japanese War in 1905.

Step 4: The Qing rejection most attempts to reform the state (such as the Hundred Days reform) and instead attempt to fight all the Colonial powers...at once in the utterly disastrous 1908 Boxer Rebellion. The Qing are semi colonized as a result and financially ruined and have lost the respect of the people.

Step 5: Sun Yat Sen, the most prominent Republican (as in democracy) founds his resistance group to China based on the notions of China accepting westernization, modernization, a secular anti traditionalist goverment, nationalism, anti imperialism, and democracy. The idea that for China to have a good future is to embrace a western style of nation state building.

STep 6: In 1911, a carelessly discarded cigerrete leads to an explosion which leads to a popular rebellion against the Qing. Before anybody, including the rebel leaders themselves are ready, suddenly the Qing dynasty is gone leaving behind a massive Power Vacumm.

Step 7: Sun, taking control of the state, founds the Chinese Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang or KMT. They attempt to create a modern Republican Chinese Nation State but erm...

Step 8: A previous Qing General named Yuan Shikai attempts to overthrow the Republic and create a new Imperial Dynasty. He fails and dies, but the civil war between him and the KMT leaves the KMT in control of only a few Chinese cities, and the rest of China breaks into a bunch of local petty fiefdoms with local military leaders just declaring themselves warlord and running China.

Step 9: Sun is like “ok the democracy thing isn’t working out” and enlists the general Chiang Kai-Shek to help the KMT unify china. Chiang starts to fight the other warlords, and when Sun dies in 1925, Chiang turns the KMT into a military positivist dictatorship with the long term goal of unifying/modernizing China and then maybe becoming a democracy.

Everybody Pauses for World War I

Step 10: Some Chinese intellectuals think that the new party should be founded on more left wing principles, and they found the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). They ally with the KMT because they also want to modernize/unify China, and accept from the Soviet Union as well as other anti colonal forces

Step 11: Chiang (with the help of the CCP) does a pretty good job at defeating the Warlords and unifying China. BUt Chiang then betrays the CCP and massacres most of them as well as left wing KMT members, and starts to adopt an anti Communist profile.

Step 12: The CCP, now much more radical, sets up their commune and fights against both the KMT and the warlords. But they lose and are forced to flee across the rural China as part of the “Long March”. Most of the communists die but those who survive to arrive to the last communist hold out in safety, is the new communist leader and totally not a psychopathic murderer, Mao Zedong.

Step 13: Chiang has mostly unified China, defeating or subduing most of the Warlords, and is slowly but surely destroying the last remnants of the Communist party, who have retreated to a few hold outs in the rural north. The new KMT state is relatively stable but still a military dictatorship surrounded by enemies. Meanwhile Japan is going through its fascist phase and is gobbling up bits and pieces of Manchuria, but Chiang doesn’t think he has the strength to fight Japan until he has finished fighting the Communists.

Step 14: Japans military on the Ground goes rogue and just sort of...invades Manchuria on their own. Meanwhile Chiang is literally kidnapped and forced at gun point to declare war on Japan in 1937. The KMT and the CCP make an alliance to fight against Japan jointly. The Second Sino Japanese War has begun

Step 15: Between 1937-1945, The KMT is almost entirely driven back to rural Western China by the Japanese, who spend their time committing horrific atrocities which the goverment still hasn’t apologized today (which is why the rest of East Asia hates Japan), including the absolute horrific Rape of Nanking (look it up). meanwhile the CCP fights a few token battles but then hides in the north and slowly trains up their forces and lets the KMT and Japan fight it out

Step 16: The US gets Japan to surrender and the CCP and KMT immediately go back to fighting each other. However the economically ruined KMT isn’t able to defeat the far more disciplined CCP and is defeated in 1949. The CCP declares itself a new country, the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Meanwhile the KMT under Chiang flees to the Island of Formosa (Taiwan) and says that they still are the Republic of China. The two Chinas then spend the the next 70 years pretending the other doesn’t exist

Step 17: Mao, now dictator of China, attempts to modernize the economy and centralize the state. The good news is that the economy does recover. The bad news is massive human rights violations and the massacre of a few million people. The PRC while an ally of the Soviet Union, really is an independent communist state that actually can hold its own. Mao gets involved in the Korea War against the US and while the PRC doesn’t win, they also don’t lose which establishes them as a world power.

Step 18: However Mao very quickly goes off the Deep End and launches the “Great Leap Forward” possibly the worse economic policy in human history which leads to the death of up to 40 million people....whoops

Step 18: The PRC leadership puts Mao in a corner so he can think about what he did and try to restore order, but then Mao is able to launch a revolution against his own government with the students called “The Cultural Revolution” which is...the weirdest revolution ever? Its like if a dictator lead a revolution against his own goverment...long story for another time. The Cultural Revolution destroys mountains of traditional chinese art and culture, kills, arrests and harrassings thousands to millions of people, and just breaks the state, finally ending with Mao’s death in 1976.

Step 19: With Mao’s death, the more moderate faction of the PRC takes over, purges the more radical members of the Party, ends the Cultural revolution and starts to semi liberalize the economy, leading to the weird communist/capitalist/mercantilism/Imperial hybrid China operates under today, including of course massive corruption. The dictatorship because less intense and relaly less communist and they start to drift away from the Soviet Union. Then in 1989 as the Soviet Union is collapsing, and their is a massive student protest against corruption and in favor of China becoming a more liberal democratic and socialist state. The goverment after a few months of dithering, opens fire on the protesters and you still aren’t allowed to talk about it in China today. Death toll varies but most non Government accounts put it at around 10,000.

Step 20: China becomes a global super power, only behind the US and EU in power and turns their government into a major economic hub, though they keep pissing off their western allies with unfair business practices. Recently however, the country has gone from an oligarchic autocracy to an...autocracy autocracy with the rise of their new leader, Xi Jinping, who has centralized authority and made the country a lot more oppressive and autocratic, while pushing aback against corrupt and dissident.

Step 21: Which finally brings us to the Uyghurs. Imperial China did this too, but the PRC really has a problem with the various non Han minority groups, doubly so for those who are Muslim and have separatist leanings. So the extermination of the Uyghurs really could be read as a continuation of how the PRC has treated the Tibetans, the Mongolians, and even Hong Kong over the last few decades. This is part of their vision of China as being a centralized, modernize, secular, unified Nation State, which doesn’t really leave room for regional ethnic religions minorities, doubly so against those with a non Chinese language.

That is the super simple version, Chinese history is super complicated.

#ask EvilElitest #Chinese History #PRC #CCP #KMT #Republic of China #People's Republic of China #chiang kai-shek #mao zedong #Qing Dynasty #Sino-Japanese War #Rape of Nanking #uyghur genocide #Imperial Japan #Xi Jinping #Chinese Communist Party #Imperialism

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saddayfordemocracy · 5 years ago

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Tiananmen Square 1989-2019

The west is complicit in the 30-year cover-up of Tiananmen

Beijing’s continued whitewashing cannot expunge our collective memory of the killings of 4 June 1989

The events of 4 June 1989, when the Chinese government deployed the full might of its military to purge Tiananmen Square of students who’d been peacefully protesting there, have become known in China as the “June Fourth Incident”.

Thirty years on, it is still thought of as an “incident”, a one-off event. In fact, it was part of a political movement in which every major Chinese city participated.

To this day, a complete definition of 4 June 1989 as a historical event has not been realized, because defining a historical event requires not only the full facts but also multiple perspectives. And in its aftermath, the Chinese government intensified its oversight of free expression in China, deploying various tactics to suppress, arrest, detain and imprison anyone who spoke about “June Fourth”.

It remains the most taboo and politically sensitive topic in China, much like the questions of Tibet and Xinjiang for the Chinese Communist party (CCP) and its machine of propaganda and censorship. Yet the facts and significance of “June Fourth” are not discussed in China.

The exact events, the persons responsible for issuing directives, the methods of execution, the number of people killed and detained, and the killers responsible for the cumulative political decisions remain unclear.

The memory of the past is an individual’s property. To deny it is to obliterate humanity.

What now, 30 years on, is its significance? The need to examine this question is vital, rational and urgent. If the CCP relied on violent revolution to overthrow the previous regime and establish its legitimacy, then “June Fourth” once again overthrew the legitimacy of the ruling party. The Communist party is a regime that used violence to supplant dialogue, directing its army and tanks against unarmed citizens to maintain its existence. Despite attempts to cover up, whitewash and misinterpret “June Fourth” over the past 30 years, from the moment the first bullet was fired that day the regime’s legitimacy was compromised. Nothing can change that.

On 4 June, CNN’s 24-hour live broadcast conveyed the event and its developments to any audience that could receive its signal. I watched from New York. Viewers in New York probably witnessed a more comprehensive version of the incident than my family in Beijing. In New York, I organised and participated in many demonstrations of solidarity with the students in Tiananmen Square, protested before the Chinese consulate, and took part in a hunger strike at the United Nations.Why does a political power attempt to suppress reality? I have always wondered about totalitarian regimes’ fear of facts. As a political dissident, I insist on seeking the truth and resist attempts to change my memory of events. Because facts constitute the foundation of my understanding of the world. Upholding reality is a precondition for the mind to function. Otherwise, the world before us is disordered and chaotic; a world gone mad.

Why do autocratic and totalitarian regimes, in fact most forms of power, fear facts? The only reason is because they have built their power on unjust foundations. Once facts are established, justice will be restored. And this is the greatest fear of powerful regimes. This is true not only of China, North Korea, or most non-democratic societies, but also some societies with democratic frameworks.

When I consider the experience of whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning or Julian Assange, they remind me of my time living in a totalitarian society that suppresses and whitewashes fact, creates no-go zones and fears the light of public disclosure. Even if the lives of an entire generation are wiped out, no prisons and no amount of lies or censorship can expunge or conceal the facts. This is why memory – individual and collective – is such an important part of civilisation. To remove the memory of the past is to rob what is left of an individual, because our past is all we have. Without it, there is no such thing as a civilised society or nation. Any attempt to destroy, remove or distort memory is the act of an illegitimate power.

China is a society without citizens. It is dominated by the CCP. And even after 70 years in power the government still does not trust its people: 1.4 billion have never in those 70 years had the opportunity to vote for their rulers. As a result, there is no freedom of speech and information. The memory of the past is an individual’s property. Its details are the veins carrying blood in the body, giving life to truth. To deny them is to obliterate humanity. Happiness, sorrow, wealth or poverty is all we possess. Once that is taken away, we simply have no future: when there is no past, the word “future” loses its meaning.

When we talk of the past and of fact, it is essential to emphasis the importance of freedom of speech. When facts are changed, freedom of speech does not exist and has no meaning because this freedom cannot exist without an individual’s understanding, vision, emotion and interpretation. What we call social justice could never exist without open discussion in the public sphere because fairness and justice are necessary for public welfare and to maintain a harmonious society. Whenever social justice is missing, there will be crisis and tragedy. This is why we cleave strongly to fact and refuse to forget. This is how we give definition to an individual’s mind, and why we must protect the dignity of being.

What occurred on 4 June is not merely a Chinese issue. It is not simply an event that happened 30 years ago. Injustice is timeless. It haunts us and affects our state of mind until the day justice is served.

At the same time, the tolerance of injustice and distorted information is an act of encouragement and complicity. Such tolerance allows authoritarian regimes to transgress any red lines. This is exactly what happened after “June Fourth”, when the west bought into the excuse that Chinese society would become more democratic after it became richer. China has become wealthier and more powerful on the world stage, but it has never matured into pluralism or democracy.

It continues to reject fundamental values of openness, social justice, fair competition and freedom. We will all pay the price for this failure.

Ai Weiwei

#tiananmen #tiananmen square #ai weiwei #freedom #saddayfordemocracy #democracy now #china #dictatorship #Injustice #human rights #humanity #social justice #purge #ccp #free press #Press Freedom #massacre #memory

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arcticdementor · 5 years ago

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Ok, I'll do my best to try, because reading some of the galaxy brained takes about China and the Chinese government have cemented in my head the agonizing fact that most people prefer simple narratives and have little understanding of history, let alone an understanding of how history affects the present.

This will be long and requires some groundwork on explaining the modern Chinese mindset as a whole. Disclaimer: I am currently in Hong Kong, I hold British citizenship by birth and frequently do business with Chinese companies.

1) Big China and Collective Society.

This is something most people really don't grasp the scale of. To assign shared characteristics to fully one quarter of the human race would be broad enough to make those descriptors basically meaningless. Dividing sections of China along any non-geographical lines, economic lines, socio-political lines, this is all incredibly difficult. Despite a massively homogenous Han Chinese population, just looking at Chinese food culture would tell you just how freakishly diverse and different each section is. There are different dialects, accents, lifestyles all across China. When people say "China" it is often completely unhelpful when it comes to pinning down what they mean. For the sake of this discussion, we're assuming that we're talking about the type of Chinese person that the central government has taken pains to portray to the world. Which is, the middle class, consumerist, worldly and tech-savvy Han Chinese. Native of a Tier 1 city (e.g. Shanghai or Beijing).

Most Chinese people are aware of just how big the country is and how difficult a task it is keeping it all together, on a scale I've seen very few people outside of China appreciate. There is a real ethos of "tianxia", or the concept depicted in the Jet Li movie Hero (criticized for being state propaganda at the time, it was largely missed that most Chinese understand, if not support, this thesis). Chinese see themselves as sharing in a common destiny and collective group ethos. This can be traced back to Confucianism - a young person can have said to have "come of age" when they have fully adapted to and understood their role within a harmonious society. This both gives the common Chinese a shared purpose and skin in the game. They literally feel a stake in the collective power and status of their own country. This is not the flag-waving nationalism that the western nations consider passe, but a belief that China must hold together as a shared country and people.

…

Chinese pride is young, and very damaged. There is a sense of grievance and hurt pride that has never been resolved, and this is occasionally glimpsed in everything from their foreign policy to their mass market serialized literature. The reasons behind this can be traced back to a century of colonialism and rampant opportunism by the world powers during the 19th and 20th centuries. Chinese histories and memories are very long, and despite happening a few centuries ago this is very fresh in people's minds. An old joke about China's view of history has the Chinese waiting to see if the French Revolution is still a good idea. China has never forgotten that despite a massive population and huge amounts of territory it fell from being one of the world's oldest civilizations to becoming the "weak man of Asia", and their modern politics has mostly been about resolving this pride. There is a shared belief, or a hidden form of mass psychosis, that China has been denied its destiny as the foremost world power, either through treachery, the work of foreign powers, or other means. Even worse is the proof that the old rival Japan, a similarly impoverished nation, had managed to drag itself onto the stage of the world powers in the late 19th/early 20th century. This has caused some real complexes in the Chinese psyche.

Adding to this is the understanding of recent history. Coupled with historical understanding that ruling China is an incredibly difficult job and only people like the legendary Emperor Qin were able to unify the country in the first place, China collectively remembers the much more recent history of the Communist revolution, the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution, and more. The fact that China's current financial power and global status is largely a result of Deng Xiaoping's market reforms and liberalism is besides the point - the defining thing that most Chinese in the older generation take away is that revolution led to some truly fucking heinous shit and a death toll enacted on its population greater than any ever seen in the history of mankind, and as a result they have no taste for another revolution. The government stays in power largely because the older generation are aware of just how much death is involved with a changing of the guard. There is also no promise that whatever comes to replace the government will be in any way better than what came before it. Sure, the kuomintang government were corrupt as sin, but was that really preferable to having everyone starve because nobody knew how to farm land for years?

…

It is no surprise that the most radical nationalist pro-Chinese are the young students sent overseas to study in western universities. The Chinese attitude towards these western academies is not great; they attend for credentials and status, but these places of study have become cultural battlegrounds and ground zero for showing Chinese students that the Western societies and arguments are fractured and impotent. Students are given courses and humanities curriculum that demonize western civilization and its achievements, and emphasize the breaking down of existing power structures. Of course this would lead to nationalist students violently attacking pro-Hong Kong protesters and demonstrations, as both sides consider each other indoctrinated suckers (and one sees the other as trying to destroy the power structure of the country). An attack on China and Chinese identity is both a dangerous attack on national and societal cohesion and stinging Chinese pride. They have been handed something that can be easily interpreted as an attempt by foreign powers to fracture the unity of Chinese society, cause chaos in their country, and stop China from achieving its destiny of world #1 power and subjugator of other nations.

…

Many people have asked me why Chinese people put up with their government being totalitarian, so many human rights abuses, this and that. Social credit system, organ harvesting. No end of horrible things we hear about Chinese government. The corruption. The dark things the CCP has done to consolidate its power. Tiananmen.

Well, the unfortunate answer is that China, as a collectivized group, wants to fuck over people who looked down on them, even if it means causing itself grievous injuries in the process. It's painful to admit, but the regular Chinese is perfectly okay with the Uighur death camps, even if the government goes to some length to pretend they don't exist. After all, surely they must be doing something to destabilize and weaken Chinese society if the government is putting them in death camps. Don't you know Uighurs can be unpredictable, barbaric, and violent? And if Chinese society is destabilized and weak, the Chinese people won't achieve our common destiny of being the #1 world power.

Chinese people don't care that there is anti-Chinese sentiment internationally. In fact, it even helps. It plays into the narrative that people hate China now because China is strong.

Privately, Chinese people will celebrate the NBA and Blizzard backing down in fear, because they equate this with power and respect. It is perfectly natural for the NBA to apologize for offending the Chinese government, because this is a display of strength. How will you be able to tell that you are stronger than someone, if they are not underneath your boot heel?

…

China has gone from largely a nation of rice farmers to modern state with terrifying speed. They are now the world leader in 5G communications technology, technological integration into daily life, the world's biggest consumer market. By every single metric, logistics, travel, entertainment, living standards, Chinese life has gotten better. And they are completely aware of this. Twenty years. Thirty years?

…

So there is an unspoken pact between the government and the people. In exchange for getting rich, the people have willingly given up their freedoms. Because you can't eat freedom. Many of the social problems in China are rooted in this short-term manner of business thinking; tomorrow, there may be trouble. Maybe the country would be in trouble. I'll never see this customer or client again. Why bother maintaining anything? If I can get a benefit out of cheating, why wouldn't I do it?

Chinese, especially the older generation, understand existential failure on a level the western nations don't. They don't take anything for granted, including the attitude of the government (and this has in fact driven a lot of asset flow out of China into other nations). They remember the Cultural Revolution, the societal madness that took hold when roving gangs of diehard Communists went around lynching people who wore glasses or owned books. They understand that the possibility of that shit happening again, or coming for them, is non-zero. So the attitude is to use every trick in the book to make sure that they come out on top.

…

There is a recurring belief from Americans that most Chinese are brainwashed by their authoritarian government, and if they only understood democracy, knew about the atrocities of the CCP, or were exposed to the taste of an All-American cheeseburger, there would be a great awakening and China would truly "become free". While certain elements of brainwashing and information control are most certainly true, there is a certain level of arrogance in this method of thinking.

For one, this viewpoint has completely ignored the possibility that China already knows exactly how cheeseburgers taste, all about the atrocities of its own government, and about democracy.

…

China's political and social state project has openly stated its intent to utilize and take advantage of what worked before, while adapting it to fit their own situation. Throwing away what doesn't work, surgically excising elements they consider dangerous or don't like. 'Socialism with Chinese characteristics'. 'China Dream'. These are adapted policies, methods, and ideals, refocused through the lens of the Party. Yes, they are stealing. They are also adapting.

Any good propagandist will tell you that the ideological battle is the first battle that must be won, and on this note America has failed utterly at defending democracy and personal freedom. This is not by Chinese design; rather, a combination of factors including financial inequality, changing demographics, chaotic governance, political point-scoring and media clickbait have done their best to demonstrate that American government is both unstable and spectacularly inept, and no longer believes in the values set down in the Declaration of Independence. America has considered the argument for democracy so thoroughly won that it has forgotten to defend it, or even the value of it. Into this void steps the Chinese government.

…

It is impossible not to watch. The US is the world's only really global power, and the current measuring stick by which all global powers are compared against. China wants what the US has, but is going to attempt to do so without the mistakes the Americans have made. After all, American empire is ending, or so everyone says. The bars are equalizing. America was a leader in space travel, so China will become a leader in space travel. America was a leader in world culture and entertainment, so China will become a leader in world culture and entertainment. America has a strong military, so China will have a strong military.

…

To leave with one last note, in the online kerfluffle surrounding Hong Kong's current situation, Chinese netizens think it's fair play to "support 9-11" and advocate for California seceding from the United States, as payback for a mistaken belief that the fight in Hong Kong is over independence. When confronted with the fact that edgy teenagers in America have been making 9-11 jokes barely a week after the tragedy and a non-zero amount of non-Californians in the US would also prefer it if California sunk into the ocean, they are legitimately surprised. The idea that this kind of independence would be preferred by both parties is almost completely alien to the Chinese, who wonder and are surprised at the fact that Americans apparently wish their country to be weaker.

#reddit #the motte #read the whole thing

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5llowance · 4 years ago

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Would you say the existence of us mainland Chinese is purely a mistake or just pure luck issue? via /r/China

Would you say the existence of us mainland Chinese is purely a mistake or just pure luck issue?

This is a before-sleeping rant so pretty much illogical in many parts.

I'm a Chinese mainlander, I've recently become obsessed with Richard Spencer's identitarianism so I started to be interested in the topic of identity, but the reality seriously depresses me.

I've been thinking about this, if Mao died ten years later and his son also survived the Korean war, the Chinese would have already basically gone extinct, I mean, the famine and the killing of the Chinese people by the communist regime were so brutal that the deaths during that period exceeded three times of the entire death toll of Russia in WWII.

After the Communist revolution, the entire Chinese culture had all been irreversibly destroyed and defaced, everything was deconstructed, everything of humanity, tradition, morality of us was considered anti-revolutionary by Mao, so since Mao died, we Chinese literally had nothing left, we were basically literal cultureless savages. I keep thinking if the cultural revolution and the great leap forward didn't stop that fast, Mao would have killed almost all the Chinese, and the world wouldn't have Coronavirus today. Maybe we Chinese were just purely lucky that Mao died early? Maybe the existence of the post-communism Chinese is a mistake. We, like insects, should have died a long time ago, but we somehow survived. We had been raped by communism so hard that we are no longer humans, and the sad thing is that there is nothing that can be done about it.

I'm not being cruel, just telling the truth.

I was always secretly upset about being mocked by some other white right wingist friends I chatted with online because my home nation is a communist hellscape, because in my mind, I thought communism was not our own fault, it was only due to the funding from the Russian Bolsheviks, but now I have seen it all, it was our own fault that communism reached China and fucked us up, and it was our own fault that we survived communism. We don't deserve to live, we are a mistake.

I can't think of a single real thing of us Chinese that is positive internationally, even the positive stereotypes, like, we are family-centered or something, it's also false because China has the highest divorce rate in the world, the CCP despises traditional family valves because the CCP is Marxist.

I lose my mind get suicidal when I realize I will certainly fail the justify the existence of my people, it really is true that if us Chinese went extinct in the Maoist period, the world would be a much better place. The only function of us left is to copy and consume.

Our government sees us like cattles and animals that don't deserve to be respected, but vilely it binds us and the entire Chinese national identity with them so every time it does something bad the entire Chinese people are hurt in the crossfire. I can't identify as a Chinese without being associated with the Chinese communist party, but if I don't, I don't know what identity can I come up with, ethnonational identity? Our government also bans us to be ethnonationalist, so I can't be an ethnonationalist too, and I don't think any kind of Chinese ethnonationalism is any different to the general concept of Chinese in the eyes of foreigners either, it doesn't matter at all.

And in no possibility I can succeed to assimilate into the western society because despite my disbelief of the existence of racism in the west, there really is racism against us Chinese men and it often goes unpunished, and it's not like it's something that I, as a conservative-minded-person, can simply pretend not exist just by following the podcasts of the colorblind conservatives. We as a minority is too successful to be protected by political correctness and the left but not successful enough to substantially influence things like the Jews. We are so screwed but we can't do anything.

No matter it's 4chan or Reddit that I go to, in total nobody likes the Chinese.

I never felt so lonely and involuntarily nihilistic before I really started to think about "my identity".

Sometimes I just hope we Chinese can just all commit suicide and the world becomes peaceful again.

Submitted September 29, 2020 at 11:13AM by NationalObserva via reddit https://ift.tt/3l0R4Iq

#IFTTT #reddit

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pennsylvaniaprelawland-blog · 4 years ago

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The Uighur Cultural Genocide and the Corresponding International Law

By Paul Bowers, University of Pittsburgh Class of 2020

July 25, 2020

As individuals in the Western world, we may feel that we are past the bygone eras of internment camps and genocide, but we need not look further than the northwest Xinjian region of China to see that these atrocities are alive and well today. This region was annexed by China in 1949, and in it exists 11 million Muslim individuals called Uighurs (Wood, 2019). Many Uighurs still associate themselves with East Turkestan, the former name of the region until the Chinese took control of the area. The Uighurs are seen to have a distinct culture, and the Chinese Communist Party(CCP) resents this since it advocates for one national, cultural Han Chinese identity of which Muslims are deemed to be a threat to. The CCP further blames Uighurs for recent terrorist attacks in China. Since the Uighurs reside in an area filled with natural resources and materials, the CCP deems it a necessity that they are loyal to the party. The result has been a widescale eradication of Uighur cultural identity and unimaginable human rights violations by the CCP.

The list of atrocities Uighurs have faced is nearly endless. Between 1.5 and 3 million have been placed in internment camps (or “re-education camps”as China calls them) where they are detained, beaten, tortured, and ultimately brainwashed into unconditional support of the CCP (Ibrahim, 2019).Through this training, Uighurs must also denounce Islam, which entails men shaving beards, women not wearing veils, eating pork, and the destruction of mosques in China.In recent months, some have even been sent into arguably worse conditions in regular prisons and forced labor factories in Xinjiang. Children are separated from their parents and sent to orphanages where they too are brainwashed into unconditional support for the CCP, and Han Chinese party loyalists are being given benefits to move to Xinjiang and racially dominate the area. Some of these settlers serve as surveillance by living with family of those sent to internment camps to ensure minimal dissent, and there are even accounts of them sleeping in the same beds as Uighur women after their husbands are detained.

However, in a shocking new development, the human rights violations have gone far enough to fit the United Nations definition of genocide because of the criteria of “suppression of birth” (Zenz, 2020). Families are sent to camps as punishment for having too many children. Women in custody must undergo forced abortions or mandatory, invasive birth control methods. Some individual female accounts even detail being sexually assaulted by officials in internment camps.The brainwashing, forced labor, and sterilization have all been used to draw comparisons between this crisis and the Holocaust.Although the CCP is not directly murdering Uighurs, they are systematically ensuring that their entire ethnicity, culture, religion, and lineage will be eradicated in the near future.

Most of the world agrees that there must be action to combat this human rights crisis, but it is tough to determine what can be done since China is such a prominent player in world affairs. The United Nations cannot accomplish anything since China is a permanent member of the Security Council and will veto any measure condemning their actions. China is too large and powerful to consider military intervention, and it has placed limits on international law treaties to ensure they cannot be held legally accountable for their actions.However, there are some things that the United States has already done to try and pressure China on the issue.

Just in the previous two months, the U.S. has prevented three CCP officials associated with the cultural genocide from entering the country, most notably Chen Quanguo, the Party Leader of the Xinjiang region (Associated Press, 2020). This measure is a continuation of previous sanctions on China that prevented officials from visiting the United States. Sanctions have also been placed on 11 more Chinese companies (in-addition to previously sanctioned businesses) by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s “Entity List” of businesses engaging in abusive, forced labor practices with Uighurs (Olsen, 2020). U.S. businesses doing transactions with the Xinjiang region have also been required to ensure they do not contribute to violations of human rights, and American companies like Nike and Apple (among several others) are being pressured to guarantee that their practices do not perpetuate or benefit from forced labor (BBC, 2020).

Despite these actions, there is much more that needs to be done if the free world wants to convince China to cease their inhumane treatment of Uighurs. One direction the world can take as suggested by a member of the Center for Global Policy is to begin an International Criminal Court investigation, even with the roadblocks meant to absolve China of responsibility for its actions (Ibrahim, 2019). Ideally, this would prompt almost all of the international community to join together and pressure China into ending its eradication of Uighur culture. There is already enough support for this idea in Western countries, but ironically, Muslim-majority nations in the Middle East have yet to condemn China even though they share a common religion with the Uighurs. This paradox is explained by the fact that these countries are largely indebted to China and dependent on Chinese investment for capital; therefore, they have chosen to minimize the severity of the crisis. However, regardless of who joins the cause, the U.S. and its allies have an obligation to hold China accountable and ensure this cultural genocide is mitigated before it becomes an even worse human rights nightmare.

________________________________________________________________

Paul Bowers is a Senior Economics major at the University of Pittsburgh who is graduating in April of 2020. He will be a matriculated law student in the Fall of 2020.

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Associated Press. “US Imposes Sanctions on Senior Chinese Officials over Uighur Abuses.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 10 July 2020, www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/10/us-imposes-sanctions-on-senior-chinese-officials-over-uighur-abuses.

BBC. “Apple and Nike Urged to Cut 'China Uighur Ties'.” BBC News, BBC, 23 July 2020, www.bbc.com/news/business-53481253.

Davidson, Helen. “World Is Legally Obliged to Pressure China on Uighurs, Leading Lawyers Say.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 22 July 2020, www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/22/world-is-legally-obliged-to-pressure-china-on-uighurs-leading-lawyers-say.

Ibrahim, Azeem. “China Must Answer for Cultural Genocide in Court.” Foreign Policy, 3 Dec. 2019, foreignpolicy.com/2019/12/03/uighurs-xinjiang-china-cultural-genocide-international-criminal-court/.

Olson, Tyler. “Trump Administration Adds 11 Companies to Sanctions List over Uighur Oppression, Including Suppliers for US Firms.” Fox News, FOX News Network, 22 July 2020, www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-administration-adds-11-companies-to-sanctions-list-over-uighur-oppression.

Wood, Bryan. “What Is Happening with the Uighurs in China?” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, 2019, www.pbs.org/newshour/features/uighurs/.

Zenz, Adrian. “China Suppression Of Uighur Minorities Meets U.N. Definition Of Genocide, Report Says.” NPR, NPR, 4 July 2020, www.npr.org/2020/07/04/887239225/china-suppression-of-uighur-minorities-meets-u-n-definition-of-genocide-report-s.

Photo Credit: SFT HQ

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whatisonthemoonarchive · 4 years ago

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The Beginning of the End of China

Hang folks, this could get messy:

A Failure of Leadership, Part III: The Beginning of the End of China

By Peter Zeihan on May 15, 2020

The Chinese are intentionally torching their diplomatic relationships with the wider world. The question is why? The short version is that China’s spasming belligerency is a sign not of confidence and strength, but instead insecurity and weakness. It is an exceedingly appropriate response to the pickle the Chinese find themselves in. Some of these problems arose because of coronavirus, of course. Chinese trade has collapsed from both the supply and demand sides. In the first quarter of 2020 China experienced its first recession since the reinvention of the Chinese economy under Deng Xiaoping in 1979. Blame for this recession can be fully (and accurately) laid at the feet of China’s coronavirus epidemic. But in Q2 China’s recession is certain to continue because the virus’ spread worldwide means China’s export-led economy doesn’t have anyone to export to. Nor are China’s recent economic problems limited to coronavirus. One of the first things someone living in a rapidly industrializing economy does once their standard of living increases is purchase a car, but car purchases in China started turning negative nearly two years before coronavirus reared its head. Why the collapse even in what “should” be happening with the economy? It really comes down to China’s financial model. In the United States (and to a lesser degree, in most of the advanced world) money is an economic good. Something that has value in and of itself, and so it should be applied with a degree of forethought for how efficiently it can be mobilized. This is why banks require collateral and/or business plans before they’ll fund loans. That’s totally not how it works in China. In China, money – capital, to be more technical – is considered a political good, and it only has value if it can be used to achieve political goals. Common concepts in the advanced world such as rates of return or profit margins simply don’t exist in China, especially for the state owned enterprises (of which there are many) and other favored corporate giants that act as pillars of the economy. Does this generate growth? Sure. Explosive growth? Absolutely. Provide anyone with a bottomless supply of zero (or even subzero) percent loans and of course they’ll be able to employ scads of people and produce tsunamis of products and wash away any and all competition. This is why China’s economy didn’t slow despite sky-high commodity prices in the 2000s – bottomless lending means Chinese businesses are not price sensitive. This is why Chinese exporters were able to out-compete firms the world over in manufactured goods – bottomless lending enabled them to subsidize their sales. This is why Chinese firms have been able to take over entire industries such as cement and steel fabrication – bottomless lending means the Chinese don’t care about the costs of the inputs or the market conditions for the outputs. This is why the One Belt One Road program has been so far reaching – bottomless lending means the Chinese produce without regard for market, and so don’t get tweaky about dumping product globally, even in locales no one has ever felt the need to build road or rail links to. (I mean, come on, a rail line through a bunch of poor, nearly-marketless post-Soviet ‘Stans’ to dust-poor, absolutely-marketless Afghanistan? Seriously, what does the winner get?) Investment decisions not driven by the concept of returns tend to add up. Conservatively, corporate debt in China is about 150% of GDP. That doesn’t count federal government debt, or provincial government debt, or local government debt. Nor does it involve the bond market, or non-standard borrowing such as LendingTree-like person-to-person programs, or shadow financing designed to evade even China’s hyper-lax financial regulatory authorities. It doesn’t even include US dollar-denominated debt that cropped up in those rare moments when Beijing took a few baby steps to address the debt issue and so firms sought funds from outside of China. With that sort of attitude towards capital, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that China’s stock markets are in essence gambling dens utterly disconnected from issues of supply and labor and markets and logistics and cashflow (and legality). Simply put, in China, debt levels simply are not perceived as an issue. Until suddenly, catastrophically, they are. As every country or sector or firm that has followed a similar growth-over-productivity model has discovered, throwing more and more money into the system generates less and less activity. China has undoubtedly past that point where the model generates reasonable outcomes. China’s economy roughly quadrupled in size since 2000, but its debt load has increased by a factor of twenty-four. Since the 2007-2009 financial crisis China has added something like 100% of GDP of new debt, for increasingly middling results. But more important than high debt levels is that eventually, inevitably, economic reality forces a correction. If this correction happens soon enough, it only takes down a small sliver of the system (think Enron’s death). If the inefficiencies are allowed to fester and expand, they might take down a whole sector (think America’s dot.com bust in 2000). If the distortions get too large, they can spread to other sectors and trigger a broader recession (think America’s 2007 subprime-initiated financial crisis). If they become systemic they can bring down not only the economy, but the political system (think Indonesia’s 1998 government collapse). It is worse than it sounds. The CCP has long presented the Chinese citizenry with a strict social contract: the CCP enjoys an absolute political monopoly in exchange for providing steadily increasing standards of living. That means no elections. That means no unsanctioned protests. That means never establishing an independent legal or court system which might challenge CCP whim. It means firmly and permanently defining “China’s” interests as those of the CCP. It makes the system firm, but so very, very brittle. And it means that the CCP fears – reasonably and accurately – that when the piper arrives it will mean the fall of the Party. Knowing full well both that the model is unsustainable and that China’s incarnation of the model is already past the use-by date, the CCP has chosen not to reform the Chinese economy for fear of being consumed by its own population. The only short-term patch is to quadruple down on the long-term debt-debt-debt strategy that the CCP already knows no longer works, a strategy it has already followed more aggressively and for longer than any country previous, both in absolute and relative terms. The top tier of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – and most certainly Xi himself – realize that means China’s inevitable “correction” will be far worse than anything that has happened in any recessionary period anywhere in the world in the past several decades. And of course that’s not all. China faces plenty of other of issues that range from the strategically hobbling to the truly system-killing.

China suffers from both poor soils and a drought-and-floodprone climatic geography. Its farmers can only keep China fed by applying five times the inputs of the global norm. This only works with, you guessed it, bottomless financing. So when China’s financial model inevitably fails, the country won’t simply suffer a subprime-style collapse in ever subsector simultaneously, it will face famine.

The archipelagic nature of the East Asian geography fences China off from the wider world, making economic access to it impossible without the very specific American-maintained global security environment of the past few decades.

China’s navy is largely designed around capturing a very specific bit of this First Island Chain, the island of Formosa (aka the country of Taiwan, aka the “rebellious Chinese province”). Problem is, China’s cruise-missile-heavy, short-range navy is utterly incapable of protecting China’s global supply chains, making China’s export-led economic model questionable at best.

Nor is home consumption an option. Pushing four decades of the One Child Policy means China has not only gutted its population growth and made the transition to a consumption-led economy technically impossible, but has now gone so far to bring the entire concept of “China” into question in the long-term.

Honestly, this – all of this – only scratches the surface. For the long and the short of just how weak and, to be blunt, doomed China is, I refer you my new book, Disunited Nations. Chapters 2 through 4 break down what makes for successful powers, global and otherwise…and how China fails on a historically unprecedented scale on each and every measure. But on with the story of the day: These are the broader strategic and economic dislocations and fractures embedded in the Chinese system. That explains the “why” as to why the Chinese leadership is terrified of their future. But what about the “why now?” Why has Xi chosen this moment to institute a political lockdown? After all, none of these problems are new. There are two explanations. First, exports in specific: The One Child Policy means that China can never be a true consumption-led system, but China is hardly the only country facing that particular problem. The bulk of the world – ranging from Canada to Germany to Brazil to Japan to Korea to Iran to Italy – have experienced catastrophic baby busts at various times during the past half century. In nearly all cases, populations are no longer young, with many not even being middle-aged. For most of the developed world, mass retirement and complete consumption collapses aren’t simply inevitable, they’ll arrive within the next 48 months. And that was before coronavirus gutted consumption on a global scale, presenting every export-oriented system with an existential crisis. Which means China, a country whose political functioning and social stability is predicated upon export-led growth, needs to find a new reason for the population to support the CCP’s very existence. The second explanation for the “why now?” is the status of Chinese trade in general: Remember way back when to the glossy time before coronavirus when the world was all tense about the Americans and Chinese launching off into a knock-down, drag-out trade war? Back on January 15 everyone decided to take a breather. The Chinese committed to a rough doubling of imports of American products, plus efforts to tamp down rampant intellectual property theft and counterfeiting, in exchange for a mix of tariff suspensions and reductions. Announced with much fanfare, this “Phase I” deal was supposed to set the stage for a subsequent, far larger “Phase II” deal in which the Americans planned to convince the Chinese to fundamentally rework their regulatory, finance, legal and subsidy structures. These are all things the Chinese never had any intention of carrying out. All the concessions the Americans imagined are wound up in China’s debt-binge model. Granting them would unleash such massive economic, financial and political instability that the survival of the CCP itself would be called into question. Any deal between any American administration and Beijing is only possible if the American administration first forces the issue. Pre-Trump, the last American administration to so force the issue was the W Bush administration at the height of the EP3 spy plane incident in mid-2001. Despite his faults, Donald Trump deserves credit for being the first president in the years since to expend political capital to compel the Chinese to the table. But there’s more to a deal than its negotiation. There is also enforcement. In the utter absence of rule of law, enforcement requires even, unrelenting pressure akin to what the Americans did to the Soviets with Cold War era nuclear disarmament policy. No US administration has ever had the sort of bandwidth required to police a trade deal with a large, non-market economy. There are simply too many constantly moving pieces. The current American administration is particularly ill-suited to the task. The Trump administration’s tendency to tweet out a big announcement and then move on to the next shiny object means the Chinese discarded their “commitments” with confidence on the day they were made. Which means the Sino-American trade relationship was always going to collapse, and the United States and China were always going to fall into acrimony. Coronavirus did the world a favor (or disfavor based upon where you stand) in delaying the degradation. In February and March the Chinese were under COVID’s heel and it was perfectly reasonable to give Beijing extra time. In April it was the Americans’ turn to be distracted. Now, four months later, with the Americans emerging from their first coronavirus wave and edging back towards something that might at least rhyme with a shadow of normal, the bilateral relationship is coming back into focus – and it is obvious the Chinese deliberately and systematically lied to Trump. Such deception was pretty much baked in from the get-go. In part it is because the CCP has never been what I’d call an honest negotiating partner. In part it is because the CCP honestly doesn’t think the Chinese system can be reformed, particularly on issues such as rule of law. In part it is because the CCP honestly doesn’t think it could survive what the Americans want it to attempt. But in the current environment it all ends at the same place: I think we can all recall an example or three of how Trump responds when he feels personally aggrieved. Which brings us to perhaps China’s most immediate problem. Nothing about the Chinese system – its political unity, its relative immunity from foreign threats, its ability import energy from a continent away, its ability to tap global markets to supply it with raw materials and markets to dump its products in, its ability to access the world beyond the First Island Chain – is possible without the global Order. And the global Order is not possible without America. No other country – no other coalition of countries – has the naval power to guarantee commercial shipments on the high seas. No commercial shipments, no trade. No trade, no export-led economies. No export-led economies…no China. It isn’t so much that the Americans have always had the ability to destroy China in a day (although they have), but instead that it is only the Americans that could create the economic and strategic environment that has enabled China to survive as long as it has. Whether or not the proximate cause for the Chinese collapse is homegrown or imported from Washington is largely irrelevant to the uncaring winds of history, the point is that Xi believes the day is almost here. Global consumption patterns have turned. China’s trade relations have turned. America’s politics have turned. And now, with the American-Chinese breach galloping into full view, Xi feels he has little choice but to prepare for the day everyone in the top ranks of the CCP always knew was coming: The day that China’s entire economic structure and strategic position crumbles. A full political lockdown is the only possible survival mechanism. So the “solution” is as dramatic as it is impactful: Spawn so much international outcry that China experiences a nationalist reaction against everyone who is angry at China. Convince the Chinese population that nationalism is a suitable substitute for economic growth and security. And then use that nationalism to combat the inevitable domestic political firestorm when China doesn’t simply tank, but implodes.

With the world under COVID-related lockdowns, I’m pretty much as home-bound as everyone else. That’s nudged me to launch video conferences for interested parties on topics ranging from food safety to energy markets to the nature of the epidemic in the developing world. On May 19 I’ll be doing a once around the world, laying out where we stand in the current crisis. Which countries are suffering most critically? Which are pulling ahead? What the shape of the pandemic will be in the weeks and months to come? What will the world look like once coronavirus is in our collective rear-view mirror? As with all the videoconferences, attendees will have the opportunity to submit questions during the event. While most of these events are for a set fee, the May 19 event will be free of charge…which means it booked solid in less than a day. Fear not! We’ll be recording and posting it upon completion. First release will be via this newsletter list. If this was forwarded to you and you’d like to sign up yourself, you may do so here.

Newsletters from Zeihan on Geopolitics have always been and always will be free of charge. However, if you enjoy them or find them useful, please consider showing your appreciation via a donation to Feeding America. One of the biggest problems the United States faces at present is food dislocation: pre-COVID, nearly 40% of all foods were not consumed at home. Instead they were destined for places like restaurants and college dorms. Shifting the supply chain to grocery stores takes time and money, but people need food now. Some 23 million students used to be on school lunches, for example. That servicing has evaporated. Feeding America helps bridge the gap between America’s food supply (which remains robust) and its demand (which coronavirus has shifted faster than the supply chains can keep up). A little goes a very long way. For a single dollar, FA can feed one person for three days

Robert Maynard

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khalilhumam · 4 years ago

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Reorienting Taiwan and Hong Kong: New avenues for building power

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/reorienting-taiwan-and-hong-kong-new-avenues-for-building-power/

Reorienting Taiwan and Hong Kong: New avenues for building power

Thirtieth celebration of the June 4, 1989 massacre on Tiananmen Square, taking place in front of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei on June 4, 2019, with the presence of Hong Kong activists on stage. Photo by Filip Noubel, used with permission.

This article by Brian Hioe was originally published on Lausan, and is republished on Global Voices as part of a content-sharing agreement.

Editor’s note: “China” in this article, if unspecified, refers to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), excluding Hong Kong. A 2019 concert by symphonic death metal band Chthonic drew 30,000 participants and featured a raucous moshpit in Taipei’s Liberty Plaza. It was also a political rally, with activists, legislators, and political candidates such as Chthonic frontman Freddy Lim and Lai Pin-Yu speaking about resisting the pro-Unification KMT party as a means to protect Hong Kong’s democracy. Many attendees responded with popular protest slogans “Restore Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times” (光復香港，時代革命) and “Five Demands, Not One Less” (五大需求，缺一不可). Such instances of public and creative support between Taiwan and Hong Kong have ramped up in the past year since the beginning of the anti-extradition bill protests. But we can also draw the line further back to understand the way in which Taiwan and Hong Kong are inextricably linked in their political past and future. Indeed, activists from both regions have long seen common cause in one another. Taiwan and Hong Kong both face threats to their democratic freedoms from the Chinese government. For years, activists have traveled between Taiwan and Hong Kong to observe or participate in protests and other significant political events. Extensive links between Taiwan and Hong Kong activists date back to well before the Sunflower and the Umbrella Movements in 2014. At that point in time, many ties developed through student groups that traveled between Hong Kong and Taiwan in the hopes of learning from each other. Interactions between Hong Kong activists and Taiwanese activists involve the exchange of not just tactics, but also discourses, and conceptual framings of history and politics. Examining these exchanges can shed light upon the political self-understanding of both sides, as well as the prospects for building power between Taiwan and Hong Kong going forward.

‘Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow Taiwan’?

Activists in Taiwan and Hong Kong have frequently conceptualized the relation between the two places as temporal. The phrase “Today’s Hong Kong, Tomorrow’s Taiwan” (今日香港，明日台灣) has been a recurrent slogan on protest signs in Taiwan since the 2014 Sunflower Movement. What this phrase suggests is that Hong Kong represents a possible (bleak) future for Taiwan, if Taiwan loses its democratic freedoms. This would indicate that for Taiwanese, Hong Kong serves as a canvas onto which fears and anxieties regarding potential political outcomes for Taiwan are projected. Political projections between Hong Kong and Taiwan go both ways. Taiwan is sometimes framed by Hongkongers in somewhat utopian terms in juxtaposition to Hong Kong regarding its legalization of gay marriage, functional state apparatus, or progressive politics. That is to say, Taiwan is sometimes posed as a lost historical possibility for Hong Kong, if history had gone differently—something of a desired future. However, the ways in which Hongkongers romanticize Taiwan and Taiwanese romanticize Hong Kong may be something that hinders genuine understanding of each local context. Let’s consider the term “restore” (光復, guang-fu in Mandarin and gwong-fuk in Cantonese) in one of the most commonly seen—now banned—protest slogans “Restore Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times” (光復香港，時代革命). The slogan suggests a temporal notion of “restoring” Hong Kong to a previous state, one that is preferable to the present. More broadly speaking, the term 光復 suggests reclaiming the past, but in a progressive way. Some have taken issue with the slogan’s suggestion that returning to Hong Kong as it was under British colonialism would be desirable. Hong Kong, after all, was hardly democratic under the British. Yet the term 光復 is also a concept central to the KMT ideology, thus signaling strong Chinese Nationalist Party connotations. An unusually high number of streets and places in Taiwan are named 光復. They were renamed in the process in which the KMT, shortly after it came to Taiwan, renamed many places after its ideological tenets or sanctified party leaders. Here, the term 光復 refers to the ideological aim of the KMT to militarily retake the Chinese mainland from the CCP, as in “restoring” Mainland China (光復大陸). But the term can also refer to the “restoring” of Taiwan (台灣光復) as a part of the Republic of China (ROC) after the KMT took control of Taiwan following Japan’s defeat in World War II, ending Taiwan’s Japanese colonial period and bringing the ROC government-in-exile to Taiwan. To this extent, the Xinhai Revolution (辛亥革命) is sometimes referred to as the Xinhai Restoration (辛亥光復), which suggests that the rise of the KMT-controlled ROC government and the fall of the Qing “restored” China, as in taking China back from the Manchus for Han Chinese. Either way, this notion of “restoration” draws out the strong parallels between Taiwan and Hong Kong. The fact that some demonstrators in Hong Kong persist in waving British colonial flags at demonstrations suggests that they came to see the British colonial period in an overly rosy light after the 1997 Handover. Yet a similar phenomenon can be seen in Taiwan, in which the Japanese colonial period became an object of nostalgia for many Taiwanese after the KMT came to Taiwan. These examples show that the entrance of a new colonial regime can cause people to romanticize a prior one. People’s discontent with the present conditions drives them to long for a past which, in many ways, never existed. Romanticizing the past can limit our political imagination as it confines our vision of what is possible and desirable now to a previous political order. Transformative possibilities predicated on actively seeking to establish a new political order are restricted by the notion of restoring the conditions of a previous order implied in the term 光復. The use of the term 光復 in Hong Kong as part of 光復香港 has likely contributed to the appropriation of this KMT-charged term by members of the independence-leaning pan-Green camp in Taiwan. Most recently, the successful recall campaign led by progressive civil society groups against Kaohsiung mayor Han Kuo-yu of the KMT used as its slogan, “光復高雄”. Translated into English as “Reset Kaohsiung” by campaign organizers WeCare Kaohsiung (WeCare 高雄) and the Citizens Mowing Action (公民割草行動), this was a somewhat subversive use of 光復. Rather than seeking a return to an a priori political order, it suggests a notion of wiping the slate entirely and beginning again. Perhaps this can be one way to reinterpret the phrase 光復香港 that does not entail nostalgia for British colonialism. Understood as “Reset Hong Kong” instead of “Restore Hong Kong,” 光復香港 calls for a radical re-imagination of Hong Kong’s future.

Yesterday’s Taiwan, Today’s Hong Kong?

The slogan “Today’s Hong Kong, Tomorrow’s Taiwan” suggests that Hong Kong lies somewhere in the temporal future for Taiwan, if Taiwan were to lose its democratic freedom. At the same time, some Hong Kong protesters have positioned the present events in Hong Kong in Taiwan’s temporal past. There is an increasing use of the term “White Terror” (白色恐怖) in Hong Kong to refer to mass arrests, and reports of disappearances and mysterious suicides of individuals who have participated in demonstrations. But the “whiteness” of political terror is specific to Taiwan. As white is one of the KMT’s party colors, along with blue and gold, the “White Terror” refers to the decades of political repression carried out by the KMT during Taiwan’s martial law period, which was once the longest martial law period in the world. Some have suggested that the worsening political conditions may lead to a wave of Hongkongers fleeing abroad, just as many Taiwanese activists fled overseas during the White Terror. As a result of this exodus, the Taiwanese diaspora eventually played an important role in Taiwan’s democratization—many speculate and hope the same may be the case for Hong Kong. In this way, these resonances give the “White Terror” of Taiwan’s past emotional resonance for Hongkongers’ in this new climate of terror, post-National Security Law. However, in some ways, it is somewhat unusual that the term “White Terror” came to be used in Hong Kong. The White Terror carried out by the KMT was justified under the auspices of Cold War anti-communism, in which the KMT claimed that those it imprisoned and executed were Communist spies loyal to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). By contrast, the CCP is precisely the political force that protesters in Hong Kong are contending with. Behind the actions of the Hong Kong government are the directives of the CCP from afar. Consequently, there is a certain irony that the term “White Terror” has come to be used instead of, say, “Red Terror”—though many of the individuals who have engaged in physical violence against demonstrators have worn white clothing during the attacks they carried out. With the analogy to the White Terror in Taiwan, some political groups in Hong Kong have sought to use slogans from the Taiwanese democracy movement in Hong Kong. The recently dissolved Demosisto, for example, had adapted a variation of free speech martyr Deng Nan-jung’s slogan, “100% freedom of speech” (百分之百的言論自由), as “100% 自由”. Deng, the publisher of Freedom Era Weekly (自由時代週刊), self-immolated in April 1989 after a 70-day stand-off with the police while barricaded in the magazine’s offices. Some protest actions have drawn from Taiwan’s more recent history of protest. During the attempted occupation of the Hong Kong Legislative Council on July 1, the words “Sunflower HK” were written on the wall of the legislative assembly chamber, referencing how the 2014 Sunflower Movement centered around the month-long occupation of the Taiwanese legislature.

Hong Kong has to contend with the direct presence of China in a way that Taiwan did not and does not.

Some in Hong Kong may even be seeking answers as to how to achieve self-determination in Taiwanese history. In an interview with The Reporter, Taiwanese activist Chiang Min-yen (江旻諺), who studied at the University of Hong Kong and has since become a link between Taiwan and Hong Kong social movements, mentions interest from Hongkonger friends in the works of 20th century Taiwanese Marxist revolutionary Su Beng (史明)—the so-called “father of Taiwanese independence”—and his theoretical elaborations of Taiwanese independence from a left-wing perspective. According to Chiang, interest in Su Beng’s work is from individuals advocating for Hong Kong self-determination but who wish to avoid the charge of nativism. This is a telling anecdote regarding comparisons between Hong Kong and Taiwan. Posing present-day Hong Kong as comparable to Taiwan’s past, Hong Kong activists indicate their hopes that, like Taiwan, Hong Kong could eventually achieve democratization through social movement struggle. At the same time, conditions in present-day Hong Kong are not entirely analogous to Taiwan—primarily because of Hong Kong’s proximity to China. Hong Kong has to contend with the direct presence of China in a way that Taiwan did not and does not, with regards to issues such as Chinese migration, or even the threat of military intervention. Hong Kong is separated from China by only a river, while Taiwan is separated from China by the Taiwan Strait. As Wu Rwei-ren, the Taiwanese anarchist theorist of national identity, points out in When Formosa Reclaims the World (受困的思想：臺灣重返世界), even if contemporary Taiwanese identity tends toward civic nationalism rather than ethno-nationalism, xenophobia against Chinese and ethno-nationalist sentiment would probably be significantly higher in Taiwan if Taiwan saw a level of Chinese immigration similar to that of Hong Kong. Efforts to transcend ethno-nationalist views of China in Hong Kong will need to find some way to cope with this and Taiwan may not necessarily offer answers regarding how to avoid nativism—it may only be because of geographic contingency that Taiwan has managed to avoid conditions that lead to the emergence of strong nativism. Moreover, we should remember that civic nationalism can still evolve unpredictably into ethno-nationalism; there is never solely a “pure” form of civic nationalism which does not contain some elements of ethno-nationalism or vice versa.

Space as an obstacle to building power

Yet if activists in Taiwan and Hong Kong have conceptualized their relation to each other in a temporal fashion, it may be spatiality that constitutes the greatest obstacle to building power between activists of the two places at present. Indeed, the roots of the present movement are deeply tied to contested juridical spatiality between Taiwan and Hong Kong. The controversial extradition bill that originally sparked the movement was proposed after Poon Hiu-wing was murdered in Taipei by her boyfriend Chan Tong-kai—both of whom were from Hong Kong. Chan could not be extradited to face charges because of Hong Kong’s lack of an extradition agreement with Taiwan. The Hong Kong government thus proposed an extradition bill that would have allowed the transfer of fugitives between Hong Kong and other places, including Taiwan and the PRC. The case is reflective of how relations between Taiwan and Hong Kong are overdetermined by their respective juridical status and sovereignty. But despite these critical differences, both Hong Kong and Taiwan nevertheless share the “China factor,” which greatly shapes their political contexts. That the primary political cleavage in Taiwan is between the independence-leaning pan-Green camp and unification-leaning pan-Blue camp is, unsurprisingly, reminiscent of the split between pro-democracy groups and the pro-Beijing camp in Hong Kong. This is reflective of how local political issues are deeply tied up with the external question of the relation to China. To try and avoid the fundamental question of how Taiwan and Hong Kong relate to China may, in fact, limit our political imagination and possibilities for political action. Protests in Hong Kong have seen a number of Taiwanese travel to Hong Kong in order to participate in demonstrations there. The start of the demonstrations in June 2019 and demonstrations around the time of Chinese National Day on October 1, 2019, saw particularly high numbers of Taiwanese activists traveling to Hong Kong to participate in demonstrations. As a result, in October 2019, there were reports of Taiwanese being searched at Hong Kong International Airport to check whether their luggage contained gas masks, helmets, or other protest equipment, with young men, in particular, being profiled. Likewise, seeing the shortages of gas masks, helmets, and other protest supplies in Hong Kong, civil society and religious organizations in Taiwan undertook the task of sending protest equipment to Hong Kong. Some of these organizations were later involved in assisting or giving shelter to Hongkongers that sought refuge in Taiwan to avoid lengthy protest-related jail sentences. At present, however, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it has proven difficult for Taiwanese to travel to Hong Kong. Though Hong Kong’s borders remain open, Taiwanese who fly into Hong Kong to participate in protests will have to be quarantined for 14 days in Hong Kong and another 14 days in Taiwan when they return. As such, anyone who wishes to participate in demonstrations must be willing to sacrifice a month of their time in quarantine, something that anyone who needs a job to survive can hardly afford. And with the passage of the National Security Law in Hong Kong, it is likely that supporters of Taiwanese independence would be targeted for sedition against the Chinese government. Taiwanese who enter Hong Kong could be targeted by the national security law, even Taiwanese who are simply transiting through Hong Kong International Airport. Last year, there was at least one case of a Taiwanese citizen who participated in demonstrations in Hong Kong being arrested after entering the Chinese mainland, and it is thought there could be other cases that have not yet come to light. With countries already scrambling to attract members of the finance industry seeking to leave Hong Kong because of security concerns, it will be the business elites—who already travel at will between China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan—that can most easily secure residency in Taiwan through existing means. While movements in both Hong Kong and Taiwan have been accused of being bourgeois pro-capitalist movements, and Hong Kong and Taiwan have been accused of only fearing China because of the desire to protect free-market capitalism, those actually at the forefront of the movements in Hong Kong hardly have any means to escape. With Taiwan’s borders shut to foreigners, it is not possible at present for Hongkongers to travel to Taiwan to seek asylum. After pressure from former Sunflower Movement activists such as DPP deputy secretary-general Lin Fei-fan, who likely broke with the party establishment to call for stronger measures to assist Hongkongers, the Tsai administration has set up an office to help Hongkongers in Taiwan obtain residency, study, find work, invest, or seek asylum in Taiwan. Apart from providing assistance to Hongkongers seeking to work, study, or invest in Taiwan, the office will also handle asylum applications from Hongkongers. Survey polling seems to indicate that Taiwan is the top preferred destination for Hongkongers considering leaving Hong Kong. But though the office is based out of Taipei, rather than Hong Kong, there have been fears that there could be reprisals from the Hong Kong government against workers in Taiwan’s representative office in Hong Kong. Despite the opening of the new Taiwan office, however, there are few indications that the Tsai administration intends to pass legislation to set up a process for Hongkongers to have a formal process to apply for asylum in Taiwan, preferring to continue handling asylum seekers on a case-by-case basis. Indeed, in Taiwan or elsewhere, issues regarding refugees often provoke anxieties regarding borders, and the notion of passing an asylum bill for Hongkongers has led to criticisms that this could allow for Chinese spies to mix in with Hongkongers to enter Taiwan. This is an absurd concern, given that many Chinese already live, work, and study in Taiwan, but this perhaps parallels how some Hongkongers have sought to exclude Chinese from “Yellow Circle” establishments and “Hongkongers only” restaurants. In observing the exchange of political discourse between Taiwan and Hong Kong in the past few years, we can see that this has also involved the transfer of some elements of nationalistic discourse. The term “left plastic” (左膠), for example, imported from Hong Kong, has become used as a term to denigrate the political Left in Taiwan. Despite the term being of Hong Kong origin, ironically, the term has been used to denigrate members of the Taiwanese Left for being too concerned with lofty matters such as asylum for Hongkongers, rather than focusing on more practical national security concerns. We should also note that students from Hong Kong, China, and Macau were only recently allowed to enter Taiwan again. Although foreigners with Alien Resident Certificates (ARCs) were allowed to enter Taiwan, the Republic of China includes Hong Kong, Macau, and the Chinese Mainland as part of its territory, as a result of which individuals from those places are not eligible for ARCs because they are not technically considered foreigners. Consequently, even with the COVID-19 situation under control in Hong Kong and many parts of China, travel from these areas to Taiwan was originally not permitted for months, something that was criticized as a discriminatory form of educational policy. Regardless, even after the COVID-19 pandemic passes and Taiwan’s borders are reopened once again, the space for exchanges to occur between activists from Taiwan and Hong Kong—not to mention China—will become increasingly restricted.

A new era of repression, new avenues for connection

In his 2012 work, The Third View of China (第三種中國想像), Taiwanese theorist Wu Jieh-min once posed what seems in retrospect a rather utopian vision of activists in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China uniting to combat their shared enemy—the CCP. Yet it has become harder for substantive exchanges to take place between activists from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, with travel to China blocked or increasingly dangerous for activists from Taiwan and Hong Kong. The risk level of traveling to Hong Kong has risen sharply in the past year. The National Security Law is likely to severely escalate the level of risk for Taiwanese activists traveling to Hong Kong. And although the Taiwanese government may be willing to allow Chinese or Hongkongers into Taiwan and there remain some legal methods for Chinese activists to enter Taiwan despite the Chinese government’s ban on individual tourism to Taiwan, the Chinese and Hong Kong governments are liable to stop activists from leaving China or Hong Kong at the border. It may be, then, that solidarity will increasingly have to take place at a distance in the future. Whether this is the case in the next year is yet to be seen. However, just as demonstrations in Hong Kong are expected to continue, political exchanges between Taiwan and Hong Kong are expected to continue to take place as well. But one question remains: How can activists in Taiwan and Hong Kong find ways to provide aid to each other apart from offering emotional support?

Activists in Taiwan and Hong Kong must dig deeper into our history of exchange and be attentive to the challenges in our present and future, to move beyond projection and into building power.

And a more fundamental question remains as to how to re-conceptualize the relation between Taiwan and Hong Kong in such a way that transcends the binary framing by which present-day Hong Kong is seen as resembling Taiwan’s authoritarian past or Hong Kong is viewed as a dystopian possible future faced by Taiwan. Both framings are, to borrow Theodor Adorno’s phrasing, “torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up.” In effect, in both framings, the relation between Taiwan and Hong Kong is one in which the other serves as a canvas on which to project political anxieties drawn from one’s own local context. The projection between Taiwan and Hong Kong, which has led to a sense of shared cause, has at its root cause the “Big Other” of China. In other words, the implicit contrast to China often forms the basis for comparing Hong Kong and Taiwan and in effect draws the boundaries around which we can imagine political action altogether. Neither negating the “China factor” nor being contained by that framework will be the great test for writers and activists in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the years to come. What we should recognize in this path forward is that the political projection between Hong Kong and Taiwan is unlikely to lend itself to acts of transnational connection that are genuinely effective for building an international left. As the two regions are presented with ever narrower paths to liberation and an increasing certainty of repression, how to deal with the China factor will remain the cloud that looms over efforts to build transnational coalitions between Taiwan, Hong Kong, and beyond. We must, therefore, dig deeper into our history of exchange and be attentive to the challenges in our present and future, to move beyond projection and into building power.

Written by Lausan

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fear-god-shun-evil · 6 years ago

Text

Who Has Wrenched My Mom From Home for 10 Years and Made Me Lose Warm Family?

By Zhou Jun, Germany

In a few days it would be Christmas Day, so the streets were full of festival atmosphere. As I was memorizing words with drooping head inside my classroom as usual, my classmate Anna who came from Philippines sat next to me and asked curiously: “Jun, will you return to China this Christmas to reunite with your family?” At her words, I was speechless, just looking at her and not knowing how to reply her.

She asked me with concern, “Jun, how are you?” I came to myself at once, smiled apologetically and replied, “I’m fine.” After a moment’s pause, I continued, “I tell you a story. Do you want to hear, Anna?” On hearing I would tell a story, my classmates, who were from Canada, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Rumania and other different countries, gathered around me, and said, “Jun, do you tell the story? We also want to hear!” Looking at their expectant eyes, I took a deep breath, and then began to tell the story.

“I was born in a blissful and happy family. From my childhood, I believed in God with my mom. She often read to me God’s words and fellowshiped with me about God’s will. Growing up under the watering of God’s words, I felt very happy. However, all of this was interrupted on account of the persecution of the CCP. Ten years ago, I was thirteen. One day during that winter, just when I came back home from school, my aunt came to my home in a fluster, caught me, and said anxiously, ‘Xiaojun, your dad has gone to the police station.’ I asked in surprise, ‘Why did he go there?’ She replied, ‘A few days ago, in order to prevent your mom from believing in God, the government people did ideological work with your dad. They asked him to report your mom’s faith in God to the police. As a result, he did go there taking all your mom’s books of God’s words as the evidence. I tried to stop him but failed. Hurry up! Go to find your mom and tell her not to come home.’ Before she finished her words, I had rushed out to find my mom. I ran fast through the streets and paths beside the paddy fields and went to the places where she had been to find her.

“On the way, I felt extremely miserable and anxious inside. In the past, my dad and mom were a loving couple and they took me under their wings and were very fond of me. Moreover, my dad supported mom in believing in God, and when brothers and sisters came to my home, he received them with her. But since he believed the rumors and slander spread by the CCP government, he who was honest and kind before had begun to strongly oppose my mom’s believing in God. To obstruct my mom, he often quarreled with her, beat her brutally, and even encouraged relatives and friends to prevent her from believing in God. What I didn’t expect was that he actually reported my mom to the police that time. Didn’t he know doing that meant my mom would be sent to prison and suffer the torture and cruel treatment? When I thought mom would be arrested by police and that I would never see her again, I felt extremely sad as if the sky had fallen and I didn’t dare to think what would happen if she was arrested.

“I searched for mom in the village, along the streets and near the paddy fields, but I didn’t find her. So I could do nothing but stand in the doorway and look around for her. I was afraid of hearing the police whistles and the worry and fear made me cry in spite of myself. In helplessness, I prayed to God, sobbing, ‘O God, today my dad went to the police station to report my mom’s belief in God, and the police are coming for arresting her. God, I’m really scared and worried that she will be arrested. God, I can only rely on You. I beg You to give me faith and power.’ After the prayer, I thought of these words of God: ‘You should know that all things in the environment around you are there by My permission, I arrange it all. See clearly and satisfy My heart in the environment I have given to you. Do not fear, Almighty God of hosts will surely be with you; He has your back and He is your shield.’ Right! Everything is in God’s sovereignty. The CCP police wanted to arrest my mom, but they couldn’t achieve it without God’s permission. With God backing me strongly from behind, what would I fear? When I thought of this, my uneasy heart gradually calmed down, and I also had courage and strength in my heart.

“Waiting for a long time, I finally saw my mom was back. I flew toward and hugged her and repeated with a trembling voice, ‘Mom, run! Run! Later, my dad will bring the police to arrest you.’ After hearing my words, she hugged me tightly, and said to me again and again in a broken voice, ‘Mom has to go. Take good care of yourself. When running into things, you need to pray to God more. We have God at our side, don’t be afraid. I’ll be okay and take care of yourself. …’ Her eyes moistened and tears also blurred my sight. Seeing my mom would leave me, I couldn’t help but run after her. As I ran with her, taking her hand, I said to her in tears, ‘Mom, mom, take care of yourself. Don’t worry about me. God will guide me. Mom …’ I kept running until we reached the roadside. I watched her receding figure, and all I could do was constantly wipe the tears from my face. How I wished to see her once more! How I wished to have her accompany me by my side all along! But I didn’t dare to say any words to detain her, as I knew if she stayed, she would be arrested and tortured by the police, and even more, her life would be in jeopardy.

“I just didn’t think that this parting is ten years.” When I spoke these words in a broken voice, Anna wrapped her arms around me, and other classmates sat around me in silence. I tried to calm myself down and hold back my tears. Then I continued telling them my experience.

“In these ten years, although I lose my mom’s companionship when growing up, God’s love has been with me all along. Besides, with the help and support of my brothers and sisters and the watering and shepherding of God’s words, I don’t feel lonely. For the sake of my living, I began to work when I was 15 and I once did every kind of the difficult and dirty work. Every Chinese New Year, when I saw other moms buy her daughters new coats, and that they cuddled up together, laughing and talking, I would gaze at them dumbly, as if I had returned to the past: At that time, my mom would prepare hot meals and clean and warm clothes for me, and also fellowship God’s words with me every day…. If the CCP government didn’t persecute and arrest us Christians, my mom and I wouldn’t be separated, and I wouldn’t suffer all these pain and harm. It was the CCP government that destroyed my happy family.

“In this decade, I always worried about my mom, and in countless nights, I dreamed she dragged me, and we kept running, and then the evil police closed in on us from all sides…. Every time I woke up from my nightmare, I would come to God and pray, for only God knew what deep sufferings I underwent, and only God could soothe my pain inside. I often thought: The national constitution expressly stipulates that citizens have freedom of religion; moreover, that we believe in God is a good thing, and we are taking the right path of life. But why does the CCP government persecute us Christians, with the result that my mom is forced to abandon our home and live in exile and that we can’t see each other?

“Later, I saw God’s words say: ‘For thousands of years this has been the land of filth, it is unbearably dirty, misery abounds, ghosts roam its every corner, tricking and deceiving, making groundless accusations, being ruthless and vicious, trampling this ghost town and leaving it littered with dead bodies; the stench of decay covers the land and pervades the air, and it is heavily guarded. Who can see the world beyond the skies? The devil tightly trusses all of man’s body, it puts out both his eyes, and seals his lips firmly shut. The king of devils has rampaged for several thousand years, right up until today, when it still keeps a close watch on the ghost town, as if it were an impenetrable palace of demons; this pack of watchdogs, meanwhile, stare with glaring eyes, deeply fearful that God will catch them unawares and wipe them all out, leaving them without a place of peace and happiness. How could the people of a ghost town such as this have ever seen God? Have they ever enjoyed the dearness and loveliness of God? What appreciation have they of the matters of the human world? Who of them can understand God’s eager will? Small wonder, then, that God incarnate remains completely hidden: In a dark society such as this, where the demons are merciless and inhumane, how could the king of devils, who kills people in the blink of an eye, tolerate the existence of a God who is lovely, kind, and also holy? How could it applaud and cheer the arrival of God? … Forefathers of the ancient? Beloved leaders? They all oppose God! Their meddling has left all beneath heaven in a state of darkness and chaos! Religious freedom? The legitimate rights and interests of citizens? They are all tricks for covering up sin!’

“China is an autocratic and atheistic country. To obtain their ambitions of permanently ruling over China, outwardly, the CCP government falsely claim that there is freedom of religion in China, but internally, they have labeled Christianity a cult and labeled the Holy Bible a cult book. They also crazily arrest us Christians everywhere, which has led to countless Christians being imprisoned, maimed and killed. The CCP truly is a satanic demon who resists and hates God. Besides, they also fabricate various rumors to slander us believers, which leads to the family members of Christians being involved—The CCP not only doesn’t allow them to attend school or work, but threatens and intimidates them. Just like my dad, after he believed the CCP’s lies and was threatened and intimidated by them, he began to use any means to prevent my mom from believing in God and reported her to the police. To escape being arrested by them, my mom had to leave our home and live in exile. Thereafter, my warm and peaceful family was broken. In these years, I have not only lost my mom’s companionship, concern and care, but suffered the discrimination and ridicule of the people around me, which has left eternal bitterness in my soul. All of these are caused by the CCP government.”

The painful memories hurt my heart, and tears trickled down my cheeks. My classmate Emera, who came from Romania, patted my shoulder gently. And Anna shook her head with an irrepressible frown, and said: “It is a lie that China believes in freedom.”

“In a blink, years passed. The CCP government’s persecution of Christians became more and more severe, so that many of them were arrested and put in prison. Because my mom was wanted by the CCP government, the police would surely find me if they followed up. So, for the sake of my safety, my brothers and sisters arranged for me to leave my hometown. But I didn’t want to do that, for I missed my mom so much, and I expected someday she would come back so that I could reunite with her. However, I knew that in China, it was very difficult for us believers to meet our family, let alone be with them.

“Before leaving, I received a letter from my mom, which said, ‘Juner, how are you? Mom is fine. Although I’m compelled to take flight outside our hometown because of the CCP’s persecution, God is with me and brothers and sisters also accompany me, so that I don’t feel lonely. God has prepared everything in abundance for me. Don’t worry about me. I have known you will leave our hometown, but wherever we are, we should come to rely on and look up to God in everything. As long as we truly depend on God, He will surely lead us to pass through this dark and difficult time. God’s words say: “You will surely, under the guidance of My light, break through the stranglehold of the forces of darkness. You will surely not, in the midst of darkness, lose the light guiding you. … You will surely be resolute and unwavering in the land of Sinim. Through the sufferings you endure, you will inherit the blessing that comes from Me, and will surely irradiate within the entire universe with My glory.” Juner, you know what? God will surely guide us to break through the stranglehold of the forces of darkness until God’s glory appears on the earth. The pain we suffer today is valuable and meaningful; it is God’s blessings and is necessary for us to gain the truth and salvation, and it is also the convincing proof of God’s victory against Satan. No matter what circumstances we encounter, we should maintain our loyalty to God, and suffer all that we should suffer to bear witness for God. This is the real love for God. You had been willful since childhood, and thus I was afraid when I wasn’t with you, you would go astray, so I could only entrust you to God, asking Him to guide, care and protect you. Thank God! You not only don’t be influenced negatively, but become sensible and obedient, and learn to cook and do housework. But more importantly, you have chosen to believe in God and perform duties in the church. I’m gratified by this. I know you are my daughter, but you belong to God even more, so I hope you can properly fulfill your duty to repay God’s love.’

“Reading that letter, I wiped my tears again and again, and offered my thanks and praise to God in my heart. Once, I was a wilful, selfish and unreasoning girl, but since my mom left me, I have learned to be independent and rely on God. The persecution and suppression of the CCP government not only doesn’t intimidate or crush me, but makes me have some discernment of their God-opposing essence, and what’s more, it also makes me truly experience God is caring me by my side.

“In retrospect, over these years, though my mom isn’t at my side, God has never left me. As I encountered difficulties, He always used brothers and sisters to help me; when I was negative and weak, His words comforted and supported me all along. Under the guidance of God’s words, I’ve known what positive and negative things are, been able to distinguish the CCP’s nature and essence of resisting God and its sinister motives, and found the correct life direction. Now, under God’s leading, I begin to pursue the truth and fulfill my duty of a creature of God, stepping onto the bright right way of human life. Thinking back to these years, I really can’t measure God’s love and keeping for me. From now on, I’m only willing to fulfill my duty well to repay God’s love for me.

“Although I have no family, God has always been with me.” After listening to me, my classmates gazed at me with approbation and admiration. At that time, I saw my teacher came toward me from behind, and I didn’t know when she started to listen to my story. And then she said to me, “Jun, through your story, we know the lies of the Chinese Communist government. In fact, they have been persecuting Christians. There is no freedom of belief in China and no freedom of human rights. We are willing to do our best to help you!”

The bell for class rang, and I turned to look out the window, thinking: It is the tenth year since I left my mom. Although I cannot reunite with her, I don’t feel lonely with God’s companionship. I only wish to do my best to pursue the truth and fulfill my duty to repay God’s love.

#believe in God #the church #pray to God

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