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  1. #1
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    The Crimes Of The Communist Chinese Government

    Horrific Reality of Serving in People’s Liberation Army

    04/05/2020An Xin
    |
    Soldiers share the memories of serving their country they wish to forget: hunting down Uyghurs, killing Tibetan monks, “selective” rescue of earthquake victims.

    by An Xin





    Suppressing Muslims

    “It was the summer of 2013 when we executed more than 100 people in a mountainous area,” an army veteran started his story. He agreed to talk to Bitter Winter under the condition of anonymity, like the other people mentioned in this text. The soldier also refused to disclose the specific location of the killing operation, afraid that providing more details would put him in danger.
    “They looked like Uyghurs; some were young children,” he continued. “This was an order from our higher-ups who claimed that it was for the sake of stability maintenance. With the help of a drone, we were able to see wherever the Uyghurs ran, they were unarmed, but we shot them with QBZ-95s [China-made assault rifles]. They were doomed to die.”
    The mission was top secret, the veteran added. They were told that this was going to be a military exercise, but it turned out to be a killing operation, which he calls “a nightmare I want to forget.”
    A veteran from the southeastern province of Fujian recalled how a few years ago, his captain was sent on a mission to a Xinjiang village. “The captain told us that during the day, plainclothes soldiers went to the homes of Han Chinese, telling them to cover their windows with newspapers and lock their doors before going to bed,” the veteran said. “They were also instructed not to go out at night, not even look out the window or turn on the light, no matter what they heard outside.”
    “There was a lot of shooting at night, and all Uyghurs were gone in the morning, the captain told us,” the veteran continued. “He thinks that all of them had been killed.”
    Unrests in Tibet: Killing of monks rewarded with prizes

    A veteran from the eastern province of Shandong was sent to the Tibet Autonomous Region to suppress monks in 2011. “Our superiors told us that Tibetan monks were rebelling and ordered us to quash the riot,” the veteran remembered. “We were not sure if it was true, but we were threatened to be punished if we refused to go. We were told that Tibetans are religious people, but religion is not allowed in China.”
    “On the way, all our trucks were completely covered, with no light in them,” the soldier continued. “We were ordered to surround the area where monks were hiding, and no one was allowed to leave. We killed everyone who tried to protest. We did kill a lot of people. Those who killed the most monks were awarded prizes. The fewer monks killed, less-valuable the prizes.”
    A veteran from northeastern China recounted to Bitter Winter the story of his comrade-in-arms who died during a mission in Lhasa, the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region. “In 2008, we were both sent on a mission to put down a ‘riot’ in Lhasa,” the veteran said, adding that they were given explicit orders to kill the Tibetans, and anyone who refused to do so could have been executed himself.
    “To fight back, protestors threw Molotov cocktails at soldiers, many of whom were injured, my comrade among them, who died after attempts to save him were abandoned,” he continued. “Some soldiers had 90% of their body surface burned​​. A tremendous amount of money was needed to care for them, so the government abandoned them, and their families were notified to take their ashes home after the cremation.”
    “The hospital didn’t treat them properly,” the soldier continued. “I was talking to my comrade-in-arms, who was lying in bed and was conscious. But after a doctor injected something into his IV, he started losing his voice gradually.”
    The 2008 Sichuan earthquake: “Don’t rescue minors and seniors.”

    “Our captain stopped me from saving a kid who was about five or six years old,” a veteran from Shandong Province remembered a rescue operation amid the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in Wenchuan county. “He told me that we couldn’t rescue minors or seniors because they would be a burden for the government. Only people between 18 and 40 were to be rescued. We didn’t even check if people who lay still were dead or alive, we just piled them on trucks. Even those who were alive stopped breathing under the weight of so many bodies. TV reports claimed that all people who were pulled out of the ruins were placed on stretchers and were immediately taken for emergency treatments. Many of these reports were false.”
    Children victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. (Credit: Lin Yi reports for aboluowang.com).“The Communist Party is a big liar: what it says is always contrary to what it does,” the soldier continued. “Those in power in our country cannot be called human beings. If you refuse to go to places endangering your life, you will be shot dead, and no one will know about it. Then they will tell your family that you have died in an accident and give them some money to silence them. I always wanted to become a soldier and fight for the country, but this dream is dead now. After the Sichuan rescue operation, I stopped watching the news. It is nothing more than propaganda singing praises about the CCP and the ‘great prosperity of the motherland.’ It is all bullshit.”
    Only veteran soldiers sent to Hong Kong

    “During the height of the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in July and August 2019, the government dispatched the outstanding armed forces from Xinjiang, Tibet, and Shandong to the Guangzhou Military Region for secret drills. They were later sent to Hong Kong,” a serviceman from the southern province of Guangdong told Bitter Winter.
    People’s Liberation Army Hong Kong Garrison in training.He explained that, as a rule, regular forces would take shifts with new conscripts to be stationed in Hong Kong. However, in July and August, only experienced soldiers were sent to Hong Kong but were registered as the recruits of 2019. Everyone was ordered to sign confidentiality agreements to prevent information about this cover-up from leaking. Anyone who disclosed this fact was threatened to be punished.
    “The government wanted to ensure that well-trained soldiers are there to suppress the protests,” the soldier added.

  2. #2
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    Good Lord, now we'll have Klondyke and OhOh ravaging the thread with examples of US human rights abuses, British colonial misdeeds, Australian treatment of Aborigines . . . and a few articles, highlighted in yellow, on the migratory path of the Canadian Goose (maltreated by Canadians while we're at it) and how China has unvested in several pacific island nations out of the goodness of their heart


    As for the above, it's always been known; Uyghur, Tibetans etc... but didn't know about the earthquake bit

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    The treatment of the Uighurs is terrible and is hard to take in when you read up on some of the stunts they've pulled. How they haven't been challenged on a wider scale for it, well, politics/$:

    Why Aren’t More Countries Confronting China over Xinjiang? | ChinaFile

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    Quote Originally Posted by hallelujah View Post
    How they haven't been challenged on a wider scale for it, well, politics/$:
    It's simply a matter of a nasty piece of shit bully not brooking criticism without lashing out (no, the US, for all its failings accepts criticism. It may not do anything about it but criticism doesn't direct policy - unlike Trump, though)

    I'm a bit surprised that Muslim countries don't speak up more, few of them are reliant on China as a consumer nor an investor

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    tiananmen square comes to mind.

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    Although off topic - as some of the purists will surely quickly discover (and accuse me of) - allow me to remark:

    There are so many similar "crimes" of other governments that are, however, not always on the sharp view of the "independent" "unbiased" media. Why? Because the concerned govts are not really our clear and present danger, or we do not want to highlight it so much - as we do for the other...

    Why aren't we similarly outraged about the plight of Rohingya people in Burma (how many millions)? Perhaps they do not suffer so much as the Uyghurs and Tibetians? Or because the media do not tell us much about that and do not highlight it, so we do not know that...

    And there are so many others e.g. in Africa. When were we here outraged by the plight of people in Yemen? No pity for Palestinians? Perhaps they are not so close to us as the Uyghurs and Tibetians, are they?

    Even the Australian govt has their skeleton in the closet, we better do not mention it, they kindly help now against China, don't they?

    Anything what is good against the criminal China - a state of the world, we - whether we are on left or on right - we cannot live without anyway.

    As usual: "double standard"...

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    Hangin' Around cyrille's Avatar
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    As usual: "whataboutism"...





    All the topics you've mentioned as being something that is avoided have been discussed on TD.

    This thread is about the crimes of the 'communist' Chinese government.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Klondyke View Post
    Although off topic
    No shit . . . you always post off-topic crap.

    Quote Originally Posted by panama hat View Post
    Good Lord, now we'll have Klondyke and OhOh ravaging the thread with examples of US human rights abuses
    Whataboutism personified and apologist for a murderous regime

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    ^^^
    I think he means it's ok to be a cnut as long as there are other cnuts to point at.

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    Quote Originally Posted by jabir View Post
    I think he means it's ok to be a cnut as long as there are other cnuts to point at.
    Nah, he's just dense . . . or dim.

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    What was the life in Tibet in last century and before? Do our righteous fighters for human rights know something about the terrible slavery middle-age life there? Somebody would like to live there?

    Beside numerous European travellers 100 years ago, there is somebody who knows about that from the 1st hand, a Tibetan. If you google "Tashi Tsering" you will find 4 of them, but none is the one who had suffered so much under the Tibet regime and who could give an account of such life. And Google does not know him despite he was later close the famous Dalai Lama (in USA not known?).

    Something about that:

    The Struggle for Modern Tibet: The Autobiography of Tashi Tsering: The Autobiography of Tashi Tsering Paperback – February 28, 1997
    by Melvyn C. Goldstein (Author), William R Siebenschuh (Author), Tashi Tsering (Author)
    https://www.amazon.com/dp/0765605090/ref=rdr_ext_tmb

    This captivating autobiography by a Tibetan educator and former political prisoner is full of twists and turns. Born in 1929 in a Tibetan village, Tsering developed a strong dislike of his country's theocratic ruling elite. As a 13-year-old member of the Dalai Lama's personal dance troupe, he was frequently whipped or beaten by teachers for minor infractions. A heterosexual, he escaped by becoming a drombo, or homosexual passive partner and sex-toy, for a well-connected monk. After studying at the University of Washington, he returned to Chinese-occupied Tibet in 1964, convinced that Tibet could become a modernized society based on socialist, egalitarian principles only through cooperation with the Chinese. Denounced as a 'counterrevolutionary' during Mao's Cultural Revolution, he was arrested in 1967 and spent six years in prison or doing forced labor in China. Officially exonerated in 1978, Tsering became a professor of English at Tibet University in Lhasa. He now raises funds to build schools in Tibet's villages, emphasizing Tibetan language and culture.


    Can be read on-line something from the book:

    https://www.amazon.com/Struggle-Modern-Tibet-Autobiography-Tsering/dp/0765605090

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    The Crimes Of The Communist Chinese Government

    Gonna be long thread, if you want to list all

    Off topic:

    When in China in 1987, I was amazed by the brutality; police versus civilians and civilians versus civilians.

    Still more amazed by the "toilet" circumstances though


    Hope that both have bettered a bit


    Back on track

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    Paul Theroux once described Mainland Chinese as the most cynical people on Earth. Anyone who has read even small exerpts from JUng Chang's book Wild Swans will understand why.

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    I like Chinese food. The waiters never are rude.

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    Thailand Expat Saint Willy's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Klondyke View Post

    Why aren't we similarly outraged about the plight of Rohingya people in Burma (how many millions)?

    ’We’ are.


    Quote Originally Posted by Klondyke View Post

    When were we here outraged by the plight of people in Yemen? .
    ‘we’ are.

    hh
    Quote Originally Posted by Klondyke View Post

    Why aren't we similarly outraged about the plight of the Palestinians...
    ’We’ are

    Quote Originally Posted by Numpty
    Even the Australian govt has their skeleton in the closet,"...
    Yes, they do.

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    China’s Plans to Win Control of the Global Order

    The Chinese Communist Party leadership believe they are in the midst of an ‘intense, ideological struggle’ for survival and that to win they must defeat the West



    The People's Republic of China now commands the world's largest population, its second-largest economy, and a military-industrial complex and high technology sector second only to America's. Behind this great mass of men and material stands Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China. Xi, supported by the class of Chinese communists who rule along with him, believe it is their role to guide China—and the rest of the world—into a new age. China's military expansion, massive economic investment in controlling global trade routes, and escalating information operations all point to a struggle for dominance that puts it in direct conflict with the West.

    In their internal speeches and planning documents, China's communist party leaders describe their perceptions of this struggle quite openly: As Beijing sees it, China’s success depends on discrediting the tenets of liberal capitalism so that notions like individual freedom and constitutional democracy come to be seen as the relics of an obsolete system. To understand how China’s leaders intend to accomplish this and fully appreciate their designs for the future, we must first come to terms with how they understand themselves.

    “The very purpose of the [Chinese Communist] Party in leading the people in revolution and development,” Xi Jinping explained to an audience of party cadres in 2012, “is to make the people prosperous, the country strong, and rejuvenate the Chinese nation.” This “rejuvenation” of the Chinese people, which might also be translated as their “revival” or “restoration,” reflects a specific understanding of Chinese history and China’s proper place in world affairs. Chinese of all political persuasions are acutely aware that China was once the standard setter in advanced civilization, the center point around which the economies and cultures of much of the Earth revolved. For many Chinese nationalists, the last two centuries have been a painful aberration from this natural order. The party labels the years that China was exploited by imperialists and divided by warlords “the century of humiliation,” a century that ended only when they took control. The century that followed—which comes to its end 29 years from now, in 2049—is different. This will be the century that makes China great again.

    “The rejuvenation of the Chinese people” has been officially endorsed as the “historical mission” of the Communist Party since 1987 but it is an old dream whose origins predate the party’s founding. In the early 20th century Chinese intellectuals searched for a way to “save China,” modernize it, and restore it to the preeminence that the world’s largest civilization deserved. What made the later communists different from other Chinese modernizers was the solution they endorsed. As their sloganeering went: “Only socialism can save China.” The slogan is still in use, though Xi and other 21st-century Communists add a second clause: “Only socialism can save China, and only socialism can develop China.”

    Listening to Chinese communists champion their socialist bona fides in one of China’s money-hungry metropoles summons a special sort of cognitive dissonance; distant electric billboards gleam through industrial smog while your conversation partner parrots Marxist cant. But this dissonance cannot be too different from, say, what an outsider might have felt listening to Franklin Delano Roosevelt address a Jefferson-Jackson dinner in 1936. If Jefferson’s writings are your scripture, Roosevelt’s titanic interventions in American life are heresy. Yet Roosevelt thought of himself as the heir to Jefferson and Jackson. He earnestly believed that his program was an adaptation of Jeffersonian ideals and principles to a 20th-century political economy. Roosevelt’s politics were a natural—albeit historically contingent—evolution of America’s liberal tradition, so the politics of the Chinese communists are an outgrowth of their Leninist identity.

    One of the most salient continuities between classical Leninism and the current version of communist politics endorsed by Beijing, which the Chinese uncreatively have labeled “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” is the conviction that true modernization must be led by a “vanguard” party that is able to act in the interests of the “overwhelming majority” of people. According to this Leninist line, free markets and free elections lead to the rule of selfish elites, and China’s rejuvenation depends on being protected from both. Despite the concessions made to market-price mechanisms that have helped drive China’s recent economic boom, Chinese communists believe that they lead an ideological-political system distinct from and in opposition to those of the capitalist world. Circumstance forces temporary cooperation with the self-interested capitalists, but these two systems cannot be permanently reconciled. This was the message Xi delivered to party cadres in one of his first speeches as general secretary of the party in 2013, when he declared his faith in the “historical materialist view that capitalism is bound to die out and socialism is bound to win.” However, as “the ultimate victory of socialism over capitalism” may take several lifetimes to achieve, China’s communists should focus their efforts on a more modest goal:
    [We must now] broaden our comprehensive national power, improve the lives of our people, build a socialism that is superior to capitalism, and lay the foundation for a future where we will win the initiative and have the dominant position.
    As proud self-declared Marxists, the Beijing leadership has carefully studied the failures of past attempts to “construct a socialism superior to capitalism.” From the failings of the Maoist era, the Chinese communists learned that economic and technological modernization cannot happen in a vacuum. In many Chinese minds the People’s Republic of China’s technological stagnation under Mao blends together with the Qing dynasty’s unfortunate discovery that scientific advances in the West had left their military obsolete. The lesson in both cases is the same: If China is to grow strong, it must be integrated with the world outside it.

    But there are dangers to “opening up” to the outer world. This is the lesson Chinese communists draw from extensive study of the Soviet failure. The party’s official explanation for the collapse of the Soviet Union—which has been communicated to party cadres through speeches, party school education, and even a full-length documentary—is that its demise had nothing to do with the weaknesses of its planned economy or the tensions inherent in a multinational empire masquerading as a people’s republic. In the telling of the Chinese Communist Party, the Soviet Union began to die the day Nikita Khrushchev denounced the cult of personality surrounding Joseph Stalin. Though the reformist policies of destalinization were only intended to strengthen the communist system by eliminating its errant and excessive aspects, it ended up eroding the foundation of the value system that made the USSR cohere. Once it became possible to question the party leadership, the Soviets lost the ability to shore up the “ideological security” of their regime. In these circumstances, Chinese communists studying the USSR’s dissolution now conclude, Gorbachev’s decision to “open” the system and expose formerly culturally quarantined Soviet peoples to the enticements of the Western order was a suicide pact.

    Xi Jinping endorsed this explanation for the Soviet collapse in a 2013 address to party cadres. “Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate?” he asked his audience. “An important reason is that in the ideological domain, competition is fierce!” The party leadership is determined to avoid the Soviet mistake. A leaked internal party directive from 2013 describes “the very real threat of Western anti-China forces and their attempt at carrying out westernization” within China. The directive describes the party as being in the midst of an “intense, ideological struggle” for survival. According to the directive, the ideas that threaten China with “major disorder” include concepts such as “separation of powers,” “independent judiciaries,” “universal human rights,” “Western freedom,” “civil society,” “economic liberalism,” “total privatization,” “freedom of the press,” and “free flow of information on the internet.” To allow the Chinese people to contemplate these concepts would “dismantle [our] party’s social foundation” and jeopardize the party’s aim to build a modern, socialist future.

    Westerners asked to think about competition with China—a minority until fairly recently, as many envisioned a China liberalized by economic integration—tend to see it through a geopolitical or military lens. But Chinese communists believe that the greatest threat to the security of their party, the stability of their country, and China’s return to its rightful place at the center of human civilization, is ideological. They are not fond of the military machines United States Pacific Command has arrayed against them, but what spooks them more than American weapons and soldiers are ideas—hostile ideas they believe America has embedded in the discourse and institutions of the existing global order. “International hostile forces [seek to] westernize and divide China” warned former CPC General Secretary Jiang Zemin more than a decade ago, and that means that, as Jiang argued in a second speech, the “old international political and economic order” created by these forces “has to be changed fundamentally” to safeguard China’s rejuvenation. Xi Jinping has endorsed this view, arguing that “since the end of the Cold War countries affected by Western values have been torn apart by war or afflicted with chaos. If we tailor our practices to Western values ... The consequences will be devastating.”

    But how exactly does one go about combating a values system? One could silence those who champion it. This is the repressive logic behind the vast system of censorship and surveillance the party has built to control the traffic of ideas among the Chinese people. As communist anxieties have intensified over the last decade this system grows more blood curdling: The Chinese internet has been flooded with disinformation; prominent dissidents, journalists, lawyers, historians, academics, businessmen, and activists who have voiced opposition to Xi’s program have been censored, imprisoned, and “disappeared”; universities and corporations have had party cells inserted within them; thousands of churches and mosques across China have been demolished; and somewhere close to a million Uighurs “infected with extremism” have been placed in concentration camps.

    Most Americans paid little attention to this—until the party leadership decided to punish the NBA with punitive sanctions in response to an “offensive” tweet by Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey. Though surprising to most Americans, the truth is that this was just an especially prominent example of a practice the party has long used to silence those who speak against it—be they living inside or outside of China. In its drive to control the outside world, the Chinese state has not hesitated to threaten foreign companies with cyber attacks or hold their employees hostage, cut celebrities, corporations, industries, and even entire countries off from the Chinese market. They bribe foreign government officials, buy foreign media organizations, astroturf protests, stir up online mobs against or send goons to personally intimidate prominent foreign researchers, activists, or media personalities. Chinese diaspora communities have been especially vulnerable to these tactics. A cocktail of surveillance, blackmail, harassment, intimidation, bribery, and threats to family members in China have silenced critics and brought one Western-based Chinese-language publication to toe the party line after another. When the party has enough leverage to win the contest of ideas by silencing them at their source, they do so.

    Internally, the Chinese government can appear terrifyingly omnipotent. As an actor on the global stage, the current balance of power and the existing norms of the international system still constrain the party’s power to control free speech and association outside their borders. The NBA fracas showed that the United States and other Western powers have the capability to push back against communist encroachments in their society, given sufficient will and motivation to do so. For the party, censorship of hostile ideas and intimidation of those who voice them is only a stopgap solution. To secure their victory, liberal values do not just need to be silenced. They must be discredited.

    The Chinese communists’ plans to discredit and dismantle the liberal values baked into the existing global architecture are incredibly ambitious. They imagine a future reality where even the notion that China could be more successful, wealthy, or powerful if it were free would sound too ridiculous to take seriously. Xi Jinping has given a name to this future world. He calls this vision “a community of common destiny for mankind.” This future community of nations would give Chinese communism the moral recognition it is now denied. The party-state would be lauded, in Xi’s words, as a new “contribution to political civilization” and a new chapter in “the history of the development of human society.” Power blocs and existing military alliances would soon melt away as the various nations of the Earth are drawn into China’s economic orbit. No country would be compelled to shift their regime to the Chinese model in this scenario, but most would recognize that the Chinese social and political system has “demonstrated socialism’s superiority.” Many would gladly adopt the tools Beijing has perfected to manage economic and political problems to shape their own societies. Democratization, free markets, and universal human rights would no longer be enshrined as the bedrock of the world’s most important international institutions or be seen as the default standards of good governance. They would instead be reduced to a parochial tradition peculiar to a smattering of outcast Western nations.

    The party does not just dream of this future: It has begun building it. In his report to the 19th Party Congress in 2017—think of it as a communist dictatorship version of a State of the Union Address, if that address were the result of six months of drafts, redrafts, and bureaucratic skirmishing—Xi Jinping declared that China had entered a “new era.” No longer would the country “hide its strength and bide its time,” as his predecessor Deng Xiaoping had directed the country to do in the initial stages of China’s opening up. Instead, China would begin to openly and proudly reshape the international system. “The banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics is now flying high and proud for all to see,” said Xi. Already, the party was
    Blazing a new trail for other developing countries to achieve modernization. [The Chinese example] offers a new option for other countries and nations who want to speed up their development while preserving their independence; and it offers Chinese wisdom and a Chinese approach to solving the problems facing mankind.
    In light of these pronouncements, politburo member and former senior diplomat Yang Jiechi urged China’s diplomats that the time had come to confidently and “energetically control the new direction of the common progress of China and the world.” The billions Chinese investors have plowed into infrastructure in developing countries under Xi’s “Belt and Road Initiative” are a key part of this plan. Each BRI-branded project, the party hopes, moves humankind another step closer to a new global order organized around economic partnership with Beijing. In Xi’s words, each is a chance to “welcome [other countries] aboard our development train.”

    China’s grandstanding in favor of trade and against protectionism is similarly motivated. By increasing China’s economic integration with the world, Xi has argued, “the world also deepened its dependence on China.” As the largest trading partner of most the globe, Xi believes that China is finally positioned to begin to “transform the global governance system” and shape the “new mechanisms and rules” that will determine “the long-term systemic arrangement of the international order.”

    Xi does not expect this contest over the future world order to be resolved quickly. In 2013 he warned cadres that “for a fairly long time yet, socialism in its primary stage will exist alongside a more productive and developed capitalist system ... [And there will be a] long period of cooperation and of conflict between these two social systems” before China has “the dominant position.” The PRC’s plan to build up the economic sinews of a less hostile order will take several decades to come to fruition. To make that future a reality requires convincing the world that, in the words of Yang Jiechi, “Western governance concepts, systems, and models [no longer] grasp the new international situation or keep up with the times.” Only when the world is persuaded that Yang is correct—that liberal ideals like pluralism, individual rights, and constitutional government are anachronisms of a past age incapable of solving 21st-century problems—will Chinese communists no longer fear that their bid to restore China to greatness will be derailed by the ideological plots of their enemies.

    From this context many actions taken by the Chinese party-state suddenly make more sense. The PRC’s decision to allow Chinese diplomats and propaganda accounts to spread anti-American coronavirus conspiracies, for example, are hard to understand until you realize that the people spreading these conspiracies believe they are engaged in an “ideological struggle” with the values of a hostile liberal order. The stakes of this struggle could not be higher: They believe that the future of the global order and the survival of their regime is at stake. Americans should not be surprised when they act like it.

    https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/n...5sjO2m0jilfH2o

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    Whatever we think about the Chinese power it does not matter. That they are a real superpower the world cannot function properly without - that's a fact that cannot be downplayed by any silly accusation.

    Whether the Chinese let themselves bothered by any MickeyMouse problems with Uyghurs, Tibets, Hong Kong, Taiwan? With their B1.5 population is like a peanut for them.

    And they have shown to the rest of the world how they are strong, what they have achieved within last 30 years, even starting from nearly zero, after centuries of devastation and exploitation by others. They can survive without the rest of the world, but not vice versa. Can any other country achieve that similarly? Oh yes, there is one, they too have shown to the world what suffering they had survived and what they have achieved after all.

    So, whatever any silly powers would try to bother these two, it will only back charge to them, having their own population to pay for that...

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    Quote Originally Posted by Latindancer View Post
    China’s Plans to Win Control of the Global Order

    The Chinese Communist Party leadership believe they are in the midst of an ‘intense, ideological struggle’ for survival and that to win they must defeat the West



    The People's Republic of China now commands the world's largest population, its second-largest economy, and a military-industrial complex and high technology sector second only to America's. Behind this great mass of men and material stands Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China. Xi, supported by the class of Chinese communists who rule along with him, believe it is their role to guide China—and the rest of the world—into a new age. China's military expansion, massive economic investment in controlling global trade routes, and escalating information operations all point to a struggle for dominance that puts it in direct conflict with the West.

    In their internal speeches and planning documents, China's communist party leaders describe their perceptions of this struggle quite openly: As Beijing sees it, China’s success depends on discrediting the tenets of liberal capitalism so that notions like individual freedom and constitutional democracy come to be seen as the relics of an obsolete system. To understand how China’s leaders intend to accomplish this and fully appreciate their designs for the future, we must first come to terms with how they understand themselves.

    “The very purpose of the [Chinese Communist] Party in leading the people in revolution and development,” Xi Jinping explained to an audience of party cadres in 2012, “is to make the people prosperous, the country strong, and rejuvenate the Chinese nation.” This “rejuvenation” of the Chinese people, which might also be translated as their “revival” or “restoration,” reflects a specific understanding of Chinese history and China’s proper place in world affairs. Chinese of all political persuasions are acutely aware that China was once the standard setter in advanced civilization, the center point around which the economies and cultures of much of the Earth revolved. For many Chinese nationalists, the last two centuries have been a painful aberration from this natural order. The party labels the years that China was exploited by imperialists and divided by warlords “the century of humiliation,” a century that ended only when they took control. The century that followed—which comes to its end 29 years from now, in 2049—is different. This will be the century that makes China great again.

    “The rejuvenation of the Chinese people” has been officially endorsed as the “historical mission” of the Communist Party since 1987 but it is an old dream whose origins predate the party’s founding. In the early 20th century Chinese intellectuals searched for a way to “save China,” modernize it, and restore it to the preeminence that the world’s largest civilization deserved. What made the later communists different from other Chinese modernizers was the solution they endorsed. As their sloganeering went: “Only socialism can save China.” The slogan is still in use, though Xi and other 21st-century Communists add a second clause: “Only socialism can save China, and only socialism can develop China.”

    Listening to Chinese communists champion their socialist bona fides in one of China’s money-hungry metropoles summons a special sort of cognitive dissonance; distant electric billboards gleam through industrial smog while your conversation partner parrots Marxist cant. But this dissonance cannot be too different from, say, what an outsider might have felt listening to Franklin Delano Roosevelt address a Jefferson-Jackson dinner in 1936. If Jefferson’s writings are your scripture, Roosevelt’s titanic interventions in American life are heresy. Yet Roosevelt thought of himself as the heir to Jefferson and Jackson. He earnestly believed that his program was an adaptation of Jeffersonian ideals and principles to a 20th-century political economy. Roosevelt’s politics were a natural—albeit historically contingent—evolution of America’s liberal tradition, so the politics of the Chinese communists are an outgrowth of their Leninist identity.

    One of the most salient continuities between classical Leninism and the current version of communist politics endorsed by Beijing, which the Chinese uncreatively have labeled “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” is the conviction that true modernization must be led by a “vanguard” party that is able to act in the interests of the “overwhelming majority” of people. According to this Leninist line, free markets and free elections lead to the rule of selfish elites, and China’s rejuvenation depends on being protected from both. Despite the concessions made to market-price mechanisms that have helped drive China’s recent economic boom, Chinese communists believe that they lead an ideological-political system distinct from and in opposition to those of the capitalist world. Circumstance forces temporary cooperation with the self-interested capitalists, but these two systems cannot be permanently reconciled. This was the message Xi delivered to party cadres in one of his first speeches as general secretary of the party in 2013, when he declared his faith in the “historical materialist view that capitalism is bound to die out and socialism is bound to win.” However, as “the ultimate victory of socialism over capitalism” may take several lifetimes to achieve, China’s communists should focus their efforts on a more modest goal:
    [We must now] broaden our comprehensive national power, improve the lives of our people, build a socialism that is superior to capitalism, and lay the foundation for a future where we will win the initiative and have the dominant position.
    As proud self-declared Marxists, the Beijing leadership has carefully studied the failures of past attempts to “construct a socialism superior to capitalism.” From the failings of the Maoist era, the Chinese communists learned that economic and technological modernization cannot happen in a vacuum. In many Chinese minds the People’s Republic of China’s technological stagnation under Mao blends together with the Qing dynasty’s unfortunate discovery that scientific advances in the West had left their military obsolete. The lesson in both cases is the same: If China is to grow strong, it must be integrated with the world outside it.

    But there are dangers to “opening up” to the outer world. This is the lesson Chinese communists draw from extensive study of the Soviet failure. The party’s official explanation for the collapse of the Soviet Union—which has been communicated to party cadres through speeches, party school education, and even a full-length documentary—is that its demise had nothing to do with the weaknesses of its planned economy or the tensions inherent in a multinational empire masquerading as a people’s republic. In the telling of the Chinese Communist Party, the Soviet Union began to die the day Nikita Khrushchev denounced the cult of personality surrounding Joseph Stalin. Though the reformist policies of destalinization were only intended to strengthen the communist system by eliminating its errant and excessive aspects, it ended up eroding the foundation of the value system that made the USSR cohere. Once it became possible to question the party leadership, the Soviets lost the ability to shore up the “ideological security” of their regime. In these circumstances, Chinese communists studying the USSR’s dissolution now conclude, Gorbachev’s decision to “open” the system and expose formerly culturally quarantined Soviet peoples to the enticements of the Western order was a suicide pact.

    Xi Jinping endorsed this explanation for the Soviet collapse in a 2013 address to party cadres. “Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate?” he asked his audience. “An important reason is that in the ideological domain, competition is fierce!” The party leadership is determined to avoid the Soviet mistake. A leaked internal party directive from 2013 describes “the very real threat of Western anti-China forces and their attempt at carrying out westernization” within China. The directive describes the party as being in the midst of an “intense, ideological struggle” for survival. According to the directive, the ideas that threaten China with “major disorder” include concepts such as “separation of powers,” “independent judiciaries,” “universal human rights,” “Western freedom,” “civil society,” “economic liberalism,” “total privatization,” “freedom of the press,” and “free flow of information on the internet.” To allow the Chinese people to contemplate these concepts would “dismantle [our] party’s social foundation” and jeopardize the party’s aim to build a modern, socialist future.

    Westerners asked to think about competition with China—a minority until fairly recently, as many envisioned a China liberalized by economic integration—tend to see it through a geopolitical or military lens. But Chinese communists believe that the greatest threat to the security of their party, the stability of their country, and China’s return to its rightful place at the center of human civilization, is ideological. They are not fond of the military machines United States Pacific Command has arrayed against them, but what spooks them more than American weapons and soldiers are ideas—hostile ideas they believe America has embedded in the discourse and institutions of the existing global order. “International hostile forces [seek to] westernize and divide China” warned former CPC General Secretary Jiang Zemin more than a decade ago, and that means that, as Jiang argued in a second speech, the “old international political and economic order” created by these forces “has to be changed fundamentally” to safeguard China’s rejuvenation. Xi Jinping has endorsed this view, arguing that “since the end of the Cold War countries affected by Western values have been torn apart by war or afflicted with chaos. If we tailor our practices to Western values ... The consequences will be devastating.”

    But how exactly does one go about combating a values system? One could silence those who champion it. This is the repressive logic behind the vast system of censorship and surveillance the party has built to control the traffic of ideas among the Chinese people. As communist anxieties have intensified over the last decade this system grows more blood curdling: The Chinese internet has been flooded with disinformation; prominent dissidents, journalists, lawyers, historians, academics, businessmen, and activists who have voiced opposition to Xi’s program have been censored, imprisoned, and “disappeared”; universities and corporations have had party cells inserted within them; thousands of churches and mosques across China have been demolished; and somewhere close to a million Uighurs “infected with extremism” have been placed in concentration camps.

    Most Americans paid little attention to this—until the party leadership decided to punish the NBA with punitive sanctions in response to an “offensive” tweet by Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey. Though surprising to most Americans, the truth is that this was just an especially prominent example of a practice the party has long used to silence those who speak against it—be they living inside or outside of China. In its drive to control the outside world, the Chinese state has not hesitated to threaten foreign companies with cyber attacks or hold their employees hostage, cut celebrities, corporations, industries, and even entire countries off from the Chinese market. They bribe foreign government officials, buy foreign media organizations, astroturf protests, stir up online mobs against or send goons to personally intimidate prominent foreign researchers, activists, or media personalities. Chinese diaspora communities have been especially vulnerable to these tactics. A cocktail of surveillance, blackmail, harassment, intimidation, bribery, and threats to family members in China have silenced critics and brought one Western-based Chinese-language publication to toe the party line after another. When the party has enough leverage to win the contest of ideas by silencing them at their source, they do so.

    Internally, the Chinese government can appear terrifyingly omnipotent. As an actor on the global stage, the current balance of power and the existing norms of the international system still constrain the party’s power to control free speech and association outside their borders. The NBA fracas showed that the United States and other Western powers have the capability to push back against communist encroachments in their society, given sufficient will and motivation to do so. For the party, censorship of hostile ideas and intimidation of those who voice them is only a stopgap solution. To secure their victory, liberal values do not just need to be silenced. They must be discredited.

    The Chinese communists’ plans to discredit and dismantle the liberal values baked into the existing global architecture are incredibly ambitious. They imagine a future reality where even the notion that China could be more successful, wealthy, or powerful if it were free would sound too ridiculous to take seriously. Xi Jinping has given a name to this future world. He calls this vision “a community of common destiny for mankind.” This future community of nations would give Chinese communism the moral recognition it is now denied. The party-state would be lauded, in Xi’s words, as a new “contribution to political civilization” and a new chapter in “the history of the development of human society.” Power blocs and existing military alliances would soon melt away as the various nations of the Earth are drawn into China’s economic orbit. No country would be compelled to shift their regime to the Chinese model in this scenario, but most would recognize that the Chinese social and political system has “demonstrated socialism’s superiority.” Many would gladly adopt the tools Beijing has perfected to manage economic and political problems to shape their own societies. Democratization, free markets, and universal human rights would no longer be enshrined as the bedrock of the world’s most important international institutions or be seen as the default standards of good governance. They would instead be reduced to a parochial tradition peculiar to a smattering of outcast Western nations.

    The party does not just dream of this future: It has begun building it. In his report to the 19th Party Congress in 2017—think of it as a communist dictatorship version of a State of the Union Address, if that address were the result of six months of drafts, redrafts, and bureaucratic skirmishing—Xi Jinping declared that China had entered a “new era.” No longer would the country “hide its strength and bide its time,” as his predecessor Deng Xiaoping had directed the country to do in the initial stages of China’s opening up. Instead, China would begin to openly and proudly reshape the international system. “The banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics is now flying high and proud for all to see,” said Xi. Already, the party was
    Blazing a new trail for other developing countries to achieve modernization. [The Chinese example] offers a new option for other countries and nations who want to speed up their development while preserving their independence; and it offers Chinese wisdom and a Chinese approach to solving the problems facing mankind.
    In light of these pronouncements, politburo member and former senior diplomat Yang Jiechi urged China’s diplomats that the time had come to confidently and “energetically control the new direction of the common progress of China and the world.” The billions Chinese investors have plowed into infrastructure in developing countries under Xi’s “Belt and Road Initiative” are a key part of this plan. Each BRI-branded project, the party hopes, moves humankind another step closer to a new global order organized around economic partnership with Beijing. In Xi’s words, each is a chance to “welcome [other countries] aboard our development train.”

    China’s grandstanding in favor of trade and against protectionism is similarly motivated. By increasing China’s economic integration with the world, Xi has argued, “the world also deepened its dependence on China.” As the largest trading partner of most the globe, Xi believes that China is finally positioned to begin to “transform the global governance system” and shape the “new mechanisms and rules” that will determine “the long-term systemic arrangement of the international order.”

    Xi does not expect this contest over the future world order to be resolved quickly. In 2013 he warned cadres that “for a fairly long time yet, socialism in its primary stage will exist alongside a more productive and developed capitalist system ... [And there will be a] long period of cooperation and of conflict between these two social systems” before China has “the dominant position.” The PRC’s plan to build up the economic sinews of a less hostile order will take several decades to come to fruition. To make that future a reality requires convincing the world that, in the words of Yang Jiechi, “Western governance concepts, systems, and models [no longer] grasp the new international situation or keep up with the times.” Only when the world is persuaded that Yang is correct—that liberal ideals like pluralism, individual rights, and constitutional government are anachronisms of a past age incapable of solving 21st-century problems—will Chinese communists no longer fear that their bid to restore China to greatness will be derailed by the ideological plots of their enemies.

    From this context many actions taken by the Chinese party-state suddenly make more sense. The PRC’s decision to allow Chinese diplomats and propaganda accounts to spread anti-American coronavirus conspiracies, for example, are hard to understand until you realize that the people spreading these conspiracies believe they are engaged in an “ideological struggle” with the values of a hostile liberal order. The stakes of this struggle could not be higher: They believe that the future of the global order and the survival of their regime is at stake. Americans should not be surprised when they act like it.

    https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/n...5sjO2m0jilfH2o
    Smart lot, the CPC. They've been playing the waiting game for decades, a long game, probe and poke looking for weakness and vulnerability to exploit with the tremendous wealth they acquired by oppression of their own people, influence and security through investment and creative dependence, infiltration and grafted influence of world bodies, purchase of 3W leaders and resources, and with valuable assistance from ideological sympathies within the west.

    They learned early on that China is no match for western military, yet, so we don't want military confrontation at a disadvantage, except as a last resort posing an existential threat to the ideology, so let's plod along by stealth.

    And imo they're doing an impressive job of it, tx in great part to a prosperous, complacent and extremely naive enemy.

  19. #19
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    China is pretty much set in concrete now to become the worlds largest power. It probably won't even need to overtake the US militarily before it achieves this. That is the main crime of the CPC.

  20. #20
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    Quote Originally Posted by Klondyke View Post
    Whether the Chinese let themselves bothered by any MickeyMouse problems with Uyghurs, Tibets, Hong Kong, Taiwan? With their B1.5 population is like a peanut for them.
    Ah, it's a tiny matter that they murder innocent people because there are 1.3 billion of them.

    Quote Originally Posted by Klondyke View Post
    what they have achieved within last 30 years, even starting from nearly zero, after centuries of devastation and exploitation by others
    And you conveniently leave out the centuries and of devastation and exploitation by their own - zero to do with 'others', yet when you talk to Mainlanders the topic they trot out is colonialism . . . not the hundred million of their own people murdered, starved, jailed etc... by their own people,

    Quote Originally Posted by Klondyke View Post
    They can survive without the rest of the world, but not vice versa
    Yea, bullshit. They can't. But the world can survive without China, it will take a while for foreign-owned companies to move to Indonesia, Bangladesh etc... trade deals to be done without China etc... China needs foreign investment in employment, technology, food (No, they are not self-sufficient in food)

    You talk exactly like CCP propaganda drones who know very little but keep repeating themselves

    Quote Originally Posted by Klondyke View Post
    Whatever we think about the Chinese power it does not matter
    It seems to make a difference to you and OhOh, seeing how you so vociferously and how often you jump to China's defence in discussion . . . an that's what a forum like this is . . . a platform for discussion . . . even for your Russian/Chinese bullshit.

    If you only want to discuss topics where you can make a difference . . . go for it

  21. #21
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    Quote Originally Posted by sabang View Post
    China is pretty much set in concrete now to become the worlds largest power. It probably won't even need to overtake the US militarily before it achieves this. That is the main crime of the CPC.
    Precisely.

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    An excellent AJ documentary, Death by Design, watched it on release and was brought to attention when they repeated it a few days ago; doesn't single out China, more firing volleys at the tech industry in general, though China is invariably the target by virtue of its manufacture/supply roles.


  23. #23
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    ^^ Part of that crime is that they have stolen a huge amount of technological know-how.

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    Quote Originally Posted by sabang View Post
    China is pretty much set in concrete now to become the worlds largest power. It probably won't even need to overtake the US militarily before it achieves this. That is the main crime of the CPC.
    they got us by the balls, and we knew it would happen like this since day 1

    the real question is why did we let them grab us by the balls like that

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    Quote Originally Posted by sabang View Post
    China is pretty much set in concrete now to become the worlds largest power. It probably won't even need to overtake the US militarily before it achieves this. That is the main crime of the CPC.
    Crime to civilised folks is ingenuity for the CPC.

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