Chinese concentration camps

[pietillidie]

^You may have heard, say, that Belgium was in the Congo, but you can't know much more than a Billy Joel reference to make such a silly claim about Africa.

I'm by no means expecting anything but nationalism and imperialism from China. This is why for the good of the planet we need to help countries break down their worst nationalist and fundamentalist instincts. But we can't do that from the very low ground we're on, defending old school racists, creating foreigner panic, ignoring the refugees we created in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Rohingya one minute, only to pretend we care about the Uyghurs the next. All the while clinging to the fantasy that our worst is somehow superior to the worst of others. We're parasiting off historical fortune, and the rest of the world knows it.

Five minutes ago all we heard was rubbish about Muslims taking over the world, accompanied by an aggressive open bigotry. Before that it was the red menace. Now the beast of Revelation is China.

At some point we have to grow up and start building bridges with the billions of other humans we think we're better than. This is a hard-nosed security and economic requirement; on a dense multilateral planet more of the same arrogant imperialism will get everyone killed.

[Wokko]

Here's what those benevolent Chinese communists are doing to their own minorities.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=12295956

But yeah, they're going to be benevolent colonial overlords for Africa

[David]

I’m not defending China for a minute, but I think you need to acknowledge the difference between how it treats those within its territory and how it treats those beyond it, because these are vitally different and carry very different motivations and goals. The Chinese government will expect obsequiousness from its client states, but it’s not going to set up proxy re-education camps in Angola. Even the US, the model for much of this kind of dividing and conquering and a far more overtly violent and ruthless international hegemon, doesn’t do that.

As a parallel, consider Russia, which expects and demands compliance from former Soviet states at pain of invasion, but presumably has no interest whatsoever in moving its troops into Poland, Finland or Mongolia. Here, it’s important to recognise that territory is about perception rather than lines on a map, and very much bound up in nationalistic ideas. Perhaps I shouldn’t speak too soon, but the hegemony of the 21st century (much like that of the second half of the 20th century) seems to no longer be about territorial expansion; it’s about ruthless policing of a country’s own borders and what lies within them + accumulation of smaller tributary states that are economically – and thus politically – dependent on the superpower in question. This is why fears of China literally invading Australia are far-fetched, by the way: there are many ways for our country to fall under Beijing’s thumb without so much as a single submarine entering Sydney Harbour.

[stui magpie]

China has no need to literally militarily invade, they're doing it by stealth economically.

[David]

Yep, that’s what I mean. And that means that it’s very unlikely that China’s going to do anything even vaguely resembling a 19th-century Europe on Africa. They have other ways of getting what they want.

[roar]

[Wokko]

[roar]

Look at the company we are keeping.

Fully agree that a service economy is shit but as you say resource economy is also shite.

[Wokko]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPt9pGfpmS0

[David]

<Discussions about animal welfare in China and Asia moved here: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/viewtopic.php?t=86920. Thanks, David for BBMods.>

[Wokko]

Like there are cultural reasons for Mainland chinese to have these attitudes. They've had 3 generations of Communist collectivism as well as other philosophical and cultural anti-individualist dogma.

[think positive]

[pietillidie]