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Watching the CCP Press
A Chinese factory in Zambia was set on fire. The following quotes are from the Global Times, the CCP news outlet.
The three Chinese nationals from East China’s Jiangsu Province were murdered by three local Zambians who then set fire to the warehouse of a Chinese clothing company on Sunday, outraging the Chinese community in the African country, local sources revealed to the Global Times.
According to a preliminary investigation by Zambian police, the suspects, two men and one woman, entered the warehouse and killed the victims before committing robbery, and then set a fire to destroy evidence.
Then the article wanders into the territory of victimhood.
Some Chinese living in the country expressed concern over their own safety. Some locals have misunderstood epidemic measures adopted by some Chinese companies, they said. . . Local Zambians have misunderstood why Chinese companies are prohibiting their employees from going outdoors during the epidemic: allegedly one of the reasons for the murders.
The Chinese are acting responsibly, and those irrational locals just don’t understand. But why would they not accept the wisdom of the Chinese position?
Some reports by Western and local media and politicians have stigmatized China and are affecting Africans’ ideas of China and Chinese people, Chinese nationals working in Zambia told the Global Times.
False Western reports have generated a bad impression of Chinese, Wang Xin, deputy head of the Overseas Chinese Association in Zambia, told the Global Times on Monday. Those who thought the novel coronavirus originated in China were staying away from Chinese and this had induced conflict between Chinese and local Zambians, Wang said.
False Western reports led to people thinking the virus originated in China.
Huh.
The rest of the article lets the reader draw the unavoidable conclusions:
Some Chinese living in Zambia also claimed that Lusaka Mayor Miles Sampa has been playing a role in provoking conflicts between Chinese and local Zambians with his allegedly frequent comments against Chinese.
During an inspection of a cement factory with a closed-off management system amid the epidemic, Sampa accused the Chinese management of being “slavery reloaded” and posted the comment “Black Zambians did not originate Coronavirus. It originated in China,” he said on his Facebook page. He also publicly used derogatory words such as “Chinaman.”
Get it? The truly lamentable virus is racism, spread by the lies of the Western press.
This is what they put in their English-facing pages; imagine what we don’t see.
Makes me get almost nostalgic for the USSR – they lied just as much, but they didn’t whine like the CCP. Such delicate sensibilities , so easily bruised. Of course, it’s for domestic consumption: those Western devils are Stigmatizing China, which is inseparable from the CCP, and this baseless slander is a coordinated attempt to sully the shining truth of Xi.
If I could make an observation, it might be this: Xi, and by extension, his political apparatus is really bad at reading the room. This was actually an opportunity to bind the world’s economies tighter to China if they’d behaved differently. Lies, delays, defective medical equipment, and utter BS deflecting responsibility may play well domestically, but when you have your forearm on the windpipe of the domestic audience, what’s the point? The world expected the CCP to act like a grown-up who shared the values of the international system they desire to join, and the CCP says nah, bro, we’re going to deflect all criticism and screw Hong Kong and threaten Taiwan and India also you should buy our stuff, because screw you.
They may have thought this would work in the West because they had penetrated the academic institutions, corrupted the elites in government with investments, depended on the reflexive anti-Americanism of the chattering class, and could count on Paul Krugman to write another piece about their nice train stations. Maybe they’re right. But if the virus had come from Italy or Japan or the UK or Canada, the response would have been different.
We know that, right? In our gut? Those countries would have behaved completely differently. The media might be hating on the UK because it’s Tory now, but otherwise, the NYT and WaPo would be doing stories about how Canada’s acceptance of blame is laudable and stands in stark contrast to Trump’s failings, and here’s Gov. Cuomo to tell you how Trump should have done this or that.
The only time China pops up in the COVID stories these days is to tell you they tested eleventy billion people in Wuhan and no one had the virus, so everything’s awesome, and meanwhile in Virginia people are going to the beach like suicidal lemmings.
Perhaps Xi gambled that contrition would be seen as weakness – the anti-Western narrative would prove more profitable, and the West would fracture along its brittle lines and seek to channel its anger inward. Can’t say it won’t work. He has lots of help. You can always hire people to hate their own culture, but the most dependable allies are the ones who’ll do it for free.
Published in General
Yes. And they are facts, not just “reports”
I don’t want people murderd.
And the Chinese people are just not Western. They are not full of Christian values. They are full of ancient Asian values, which are fundementally racist.
That is who they are as a people.
You answered that in the line previous to the last one.
How do you not buy a phone or computer from China?
They’re not all made in China – China by no means has an absolute monopoly. One does have to check supply chain sources, however. Apple, for instance, does make a lot in China, but they also make phones in (I think) India or Vietnam (I forget which) and has been trying to spread out its contract work away from China.
But you still find gear made in Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Korea, and Japan, not to mention Mexico and the US (at least on high-end specialized gear).
Where it gets tricky is when you get down to the component level – there the sourcing gets very murky because a wafer could be made in the US, etched in Japan, and die-bonded in China. LEDs almost all come from China now, but OEMs are trying to spread that back out, and everything else is spread all over.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think the Apple phones made outside China are the ones sold in the US. I believe the ones they make in India are mostly for the Indian market. But I have a parochial focus because the only smartphones I have ever or will ever own are Apple (until some other company enters the field). While I hope Apple gets as much of their supply chain out of China as possible, I’m pretty much stuck with Chinese products for now.
I will never buy an Android phone; I do not wish to participate in the great Google data harvest.
I guess it is possible to buy a computer from a non-China assembly plant, but the parts are almost certainly Chinese.
I’m in this business, so I can say that this varies quite a bit. The semi-conductor business makes stuff all over the world.
Good. Could somebody reasonably build either a computer or a phone without any Chinese content at all?
This was also part of that Reddit post:
That might help explain why China’s not “living up to its obligations.” As in accounting standards for access to the US financial markets, the COVID-19 coverup, IP theft, and so on.
One way or another, China has been marketing itself to dictators around the world as a viable way develop that doesn’t depend on all those nasty Western ideas. Lately, we’ve been seeing Han racial attitudes meet African tribalism.
I linked here to what John Derbyshire had this to say about China vs the US. What’s germane here is the Chinese attitude to positive and negative eugenics:
That conference predated CRISPR, which 14 years later was used—in China—to genetically alter human embryos. The edited embryos were implanted and brought to term. Yes, there was upset and disapproval in China. If the little girls seem healthy there will also be a waiting list for people who want to give their progeny the ultimate head start: an IQ boost. If the girls have problems, it’ll still be a matter of “later,” not “never.” CCP members will probably go to the head of the line.
It might turn out to be problematic and not give China an edge for many years to come. But look at the attitude.
Derb again:
Without any at all? Now that would be tricky. But it would also be tricky to build a computer without any US content too. Supply chains are very complicated.
I am interested in starving China of revenue; the rest of the world is not an issue.
This cannot happen all at once – it will take years and pots and pots of money to do so. People have to invest in new factories, reroute raw materials, and train other workers. Some things will take longer – like training up new domestic tool and die makers (one of my plastics suppliers now has to go to China for many of his dies because die makers here are in short supply). And this hardly touches the capital equipment involved. It took 20-30 years for China to get where it is, and realistically it could take as long to change that.
Imagine a country rapidly industrializing, moving over a century from peasants on the land to cutting edge technology. What with small farmers displaced from the land by changes in agriculture, shifting industrial needs and other factors, your country has a lot of unemployed workers. Also a lot of young men on the make, with poor economic prospects, and therefore poor marital prospects.
But you need critical resources, you’re developing a lot of business interests overseas and your potential sources of unrest become a resource to send out to chase possible riches for themselves. The ones who succeed, you will keep ties with and encourage them to come home. The others, well… If they live, they’ll be on the upper end of the food chain wherever they might be. Or not.
What, you thought I was talking about China? No, I meant England from the mid to late 18th century on.
Read Kipling’s early works, things like Barrack-Room Ballads and Plain Tales From the Hills. When you read them as a boy, they sound like a great adventure. When you read them as an adult, the sadness and even despair come through.
Of course, I actually am talking about China, too. The additional wrinkle is tens of millions of men of military age with no marriage prospects at home.
China can afford to lose a few here and there. A lot cheaper than civil unrest at home or a war abroad.
That was part of the plan, anyway.
Expat South African/Texas transplant Kim Du Toit wrote Let Africa Sink 18 years ago. The essay is still relevant today. There are CoC compliance violations.
He noted then that China didn’t have the money. It does now, and no Western scruples, either.
China is big, so is Africa. Both are (differently) tribal. This won’t be pretty.
If you read the essay and get a white supremacist vibe, you’re wrong and he uses his essay as a point of departure to address that here.
There’s an old Soviet era joke.
A Russian and an American are singing the praises of their respective homelands.
The American: “Why, I can stand across from the White House and denounce the President of the United States with no problem.”
The Russian: “What’s the big deal? I can stand across from the Kremlin and denounce the President of the United States; I won’t have a problem either.”
Mary Chastain at Legal Insurrection:
Something is about to happen, though. This just in from Reuters:
Our military servicemembers, civilian DOD employees, and military retirees are paying for our declared enemy’s military buildup.
*The Board, chaired by Obama appointee Michael Kennedy, also includes Obama appointees Dana Bilyeu, Ronald McCray, and David Jones and Bush appointee Terrence A. Duffy. It met today.
A search of the Wall Street Journal site for “FRTIB” and its full name returned only one entry. I guess the Journal doesn’t want us to know this stuff.
It happens a lot in Africa, though more along tribal than racial lines.
Well, yeah. Because tribes are their races.
Family and tribe are more basic than race.
“Theodore Dalrymple” on family in the Third World (specifically, Africa):
Indeed. And we can be confident that what they are so willing to do to their own people they will be even more willing to do to foreigners. We already know that the regime has expansionist, imperialist aims. Combined with its history of genocide it seems insane to think we can “do business” with them.
A laughable analogy. In what way are we hostage to China so that we must trade in order to not be murdered?
I buy Korean phones. And the computers I buy are not Chinese branded or have Chinese software on them. The Taiwanese and Koreans and Japanese are pretty careful; they know the risks if their products were found to be Chinese spyware.
I was exploring the edge case. That is one way to test an argument.
The proposition that no matter what, we should not trade with China, is broken at the edge case. Which suggests it is not fundamentally correct. The principle is established: trading with evil is not always and necessarily wrong.
How much we should trade and what we should trade is the next question.
I’m writing this using my Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon computer. I.e. on my Chinese computer. It replaced a Dell XPS 15. I’m glad I got the Lenovo before all the current troubles came into the news.
The question in the case of forced vital organ harvesting to order is who we should kill to save your (or your loved one’s) life. Since people go to China to receive life-saving transplants, which do better with tissue matching, and since the Chinese are known to type prisoners for organ inventory purposes, this is not a hypothetical. What can or must a person do, to procure such an organ ?
It sounded more like a provocative assertion than an exploration.
Larry Niven’s science fiction stories about organleggers are somewhat pertinent: some have to do with people who need transplants going to criminals who they know get organs from murder victims. Others have to do with voters approving laws that mandate the death penalty for increasingly minor crimes because they know this will increase the stock of available legal organs.
Like the one about speeding leading to the death penalty.
Thanks. Civil society is hard to build and is fragile. There will always be people who take advantage and game the system, but China does that to the West as a matter of national strategy.
The only way I know to test a thesis is to assert it and then see how it stands up to criticism. Explorations don’t get properly critiqued.
I dis agree. Most business don’t price China screwing you over into the equation because its a long term cost. Even those companies that know it will happen ignore it because its long term cost and most business only care about short term profit so the mangers can get their bonus.
Over-the-top assertions are not necessary. Better to start with a more reasonable question.