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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
And profitable trade enriches the Chinese regime, increasing its ability to make war. So the less trade with such a known enemy the better.
When people make an assertion, an over-the-top test case is a good way to explore that assertion, and perhaps provoke the asserting person to think more carefully and make a more limited or qualified assertion. The method of exploration is also known as reductio ad absurdum. In other words, I approve of iWe’s method 100 percent, even though he seems to be using a different terminology now. (Some people would say reductio ad absurdum is a logical fallacy, but it’s not a logical fallacy except when it is being used to make a logical fallacy.)
A question is not a thesis. A question cannot be tested the same way. Indeed, on this site, questions usually make much less progress than do bold assertions – when questions are asked, people tend to have a reflexive answer, but when they have to attack a thesis, it makes them actually think.
For example, many want to say:
1: China is our enemy
2: Because they are our enemy we should not trade with them.
These posters are happy to argue about whether China is our enemy, or whether trade helps open up a society or not. Old arguments slicking down familiar neural pathways.
But a statement that Trade with the Enemy is not necessarily actually bad (compared to the alternatives) forces people to actually think about their assumptions. Just because China wants to trade does not necessarily mean that we lose every time we trade with them, for example.
But it also enriches us, increasing our health and wealth. Why are you so sure that we necessarily lose in every trade?
Better to shift that trade to other, more friendly nations. Or are you untroubled by a genocidal enemy with increasing military power?
How about because every trade that China profits from, strengthens an enemy?
Depends on whether it strengthens us more than it strengthens China. Of course, it’s not as simple as that, as there are both short-term and long-term considerations.
That was also part of an earlier post I saw: our “profit” is mostly short-term business balance sheets. China’s “profit” is more toward long-term global domination. Even if you could somehow prove that the short-term balance sheet profit is “bigger,” it’s still not an equivalence.
China is our enemy and not only should we not trade, we should work to impoverishe them. We should work to drive them into destruction and implosion such they are not a threat.
That is what you do with an enemy.
Trump cannot be China for one obvious reason: he is Russia!!
I had to double check the date of your remarks, as “increasing our health and wealth” was a popular thought regarding China before the Wuhan flu, but certainly not afterwards.
I think that calls for an “Oh, snap!”