Thread: The View, from China

Yeah. Like this.

Xi Jinping Trends Online Amid Coup Rumors, Canceled Flights

Chinese President Xi Jinping became one of the top trending topics on Twitter amid unsubstantiated reports he is under house arrest and that China is in the midst of a military coup.


Xi and the phrase #ChinaCoup trended on social media after tens of thousands of users spread unconfirmed rumors that the president was detained and overthrown by the China's People's Liberation Army.

This speculation, which has not been discussed by any reputable sources, arrived as there are hardly any commercial flights flying over the capital of Beijing on Saturday, with unverified reports claiming all trains and buses are also being canceled out of Beijing.


MORE Xi Jinping Trends Online Amid Coup Rumors, Canceled Flights


You are a koolaid drinker, sabang.

Nope, I am certainly not Falun Gong, and wouldn't run with any of their 'scoops'.

Happy National Day.

India Today investigated the claims - that the flights were cancelled on September 21 - but it did not find any unnatural drop in the number of flights at any given time. The flight operations also appeared normal over Beijing, where the bulk of the so called military actions were to take place. Not only this, flight activity was also normal on in the following days, on September 22, 23, 34, and 25. There were not even the slightest outliers in the patterns.

Was there a massive cancellation of flights in China? Here's what we found

Don't worry, I will let you know if there is a real coup- actual or attempted- in China.

I can understand everyones enthusiasm for the topic.

Crush

83 – 61

THE DAOGUANG EMPEROR tasked Commissioner Lin Zexu with suppressing the opium trade bedeviling China in 1839.

Lin initially tried diplomacy.

As British traders were growing the drug in India and then smuggling it into China, he hoped an appeal to their country’s sense of honour might be salutary.
Before the outbreak of the First Opium War, he wrote to Queen Victoria, explaining the harm that was being caused by the “barbarian merchants”, and inquiring “where is your conscience?”

As no reply was forthcoming, Lin destroyed 20,000 chests containing 1,150,000 kg of opium in Humen, Guangdong, whereupon Britain invaded China in support of its drug traffickers.

The answer was violence

Britain, as the world’s greatest military power, had little difficulty in overcoming a country that was weak, introverted, and technologically handicapped. The peace terms it subsequently imposed on China in the Treaty of Nanking (1842) were humiliating in the extreme, although they were only the start, and other foreign powers also muscled in on its territory. It is little wonder, therefore, that, after 1949, it became common for schools throughout China to display posters proclaiming, “Wu Wang Guo Chi” (Never forget national humiliation).

Those days, however, are gone forever, although this has not pleased everyone. As China spreads its wings and assumes its rightful role in world affairs, its former oppressors are panicking, with some reverting to type.

As the “Chinese century” unfolds, Western powers are again adopting hostile stances, and, like their forebears, trying to demean China. They have sought, for example, to use Hong Kong as a Trojan horse for national destabilisation, Taiwan as a means of provoking Beijing, and Tibet as a tool for dividing China, and this is by no means all.

Unscrupulous politicians

In Britain, as elsewhere, unscrupulous politicians have sought to whip up anti-China sentiments among the general public, and to harm the trading and other links between the two countries. Theirs has been a sustained campaign, mounted at the cultural, educational and political levels, and it is now bearing fruit. Following a small circle election among paid-up members of the governing Conservative Party, Liz Truss has triumphed in the contest to succeed Boris Johnson as prime minister, and her incoming administration is expected to prioritise confrontation over cooperation in its dealings with China.

This should surprise nobody, as Truss and her ilk, eager to buttress US hegemony, see Britain’s role in the post-Brexit era as one of subservience to Washington, facilitating its agenda and promoting the illusion that one size fits all. They resent China’s successes, and obsess about its resurgence. In consequence, they belittle its achievements, try to contain its progress, and decry the revival of a country their predecessors ruthlessly exploited, although China is not without redress.

The question of reparations

On Sept 1, for example, Poland announced that it is suing Germany for US$1.3 trillion of war reparations for the Nazis’ invasion and occupation of the country in World War II, and this might give Truss pause for thought. After all, during the First Opium War, British troops, according to The Sage Encyclopedia of War, killed or wounded between 18,000 and 20,000 Chinese, rising to approximately 30,000 Chinese in the Second Opium War.

In both wars, the invaders indulged in shameful destruction, and, in 1860, the Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan), described by the French writer Victor Hugo as “one of the wonders of the world”, was torched, on the express orders of the British High Commissioner, the Earl of Elgin.

This, of course, was no ordinary palace, and it comprised over 80 square miles filled with pagodas, libraries, fountains and palaces, some designed by Jesuits and built in the European baroque style. Before the palace was razed, invaluable artifacts were looted, with French assistance, and many ended up in foreign museums, as also did those stolen by the Eight-Nation Alliance in 1900. Some are housed in the British Museum, and this was why, when the former prime minister, David Cameron, visited Beijing in 2013, he faced demands for the return of the artifacts, said to number 23,000.

His dirty work complete, Elgin, as the BBC’s Chris Bowlby explained in 2015, “made a triumphant entry to the center of Beijing, his procession symbolising British and Western domination – and Chinese humiliation”.

Stunning scale of addiction

Theft and violence apart, it is estimated that British actions resulted in one out of every 10 Chinese becoming addicted to opium. This inevitably ruined many families, and nobody could complain if China sought redress for the wrongs inflicted upon it in the nineteenth century, just as others have done.

Indeed, two Kenyan tribes, the Talai and the Kipsigis, are currently suing the UK for over US$200 billion in the European Court of Human Rights for alleged colonial era abuses, including torture, while being forcibly removed from their lands to make way for plantations, and they are also demanding an apology.

In 2013, moreover, a group of Kenyan civilians, brutalised by the British during the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s, successfully sued Britain for compensation, and the then-foreign secretary, William Hague, magnanimously apologised for the “torture and other forms of ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration”.

Or just an apology

Even in the absence of reparations, it is always open to the British government, knowing the pain still felt by many Chinese people, to acknowledge the errors of its predecessors, and this would not only demonstrate good faith but might also help to bring about closure. It could, most obviously, issue a formal apology, for which there is ample precedent.

On Feb 17, 2022, for example, the Dutch government apologised to Indonesia for its role in “systemic and extreme violence” during the country’s struggle for independence from Dutch colonial rule between 1945 and 1949, and this was reportedly well received in Jakarta.

Of course, it takes real statesmanship for political leaders to acknowledge their country’s past injustices, and this could be a problem for somebody like Truss, but it is by no means insuperable. On June 8, 2022, for example, when Belgium’s King Philippe expressed his regrets for the exploitation, racism and acts of violence committed by his country’s colonisation of the Democratic Republic of Congo in earlier times, he stopped short of a formal apology, and this halfway house is an alternative means by which Britain can seek to atone for its actions.

Nobody, however, should hold their breath, and, throughout her election campaign, Truss, whose earlier comments on Hong Kong revealed a woeful ignorance of Chinese history, took every opportunity to demonise China.

She even announced plans to classify Beijing as a “threat” to national security, bracketing it with Russia. Quite clearly, Truss hopes such brazen hostility will gratify the US, not least because its secretary of state, Antony Blinken, described China in May as the biggest threat to the international rules-based order.

Following the U.S line

Throughout her short, if inglorious, tenure as foreign secretary, Truss blindly followed the US line at every turn. Even though, for example, it meant stabbing neighbouring France in the back in 2021, she eagerly signed the AUKUS defence pact to supply Australia with the technology it needs to build nuclear submarines.
Although, in a typical sound bite, she claimed the pact showed Britain’s readiness to be “hard-headed”, it simply demonstrated her readiness to do whatever Washington wants, and she learned nothing from its shabby treatment of France, whose own submarine deal with Australia was suddenly scrapped. If the US is prepared to treat its oldest ally so shabbily in order to facilitate its military expansionism in the Asia-Pacific region, there is no reason to suppose it will not also betray Britain whenever it wants, just as it did during the Suez Crisis (1956), and this should have been a wake-up call for Truss.

Truss ignores the key data

Although Truss’ anti-China rhetoric certainly delighted Conservative Party hawks, it grated with Treasury realists, who appreciate the importance of strengthening economic cooperation with Beijing. After all, China is Britain’s third largest trading partner, accounting for 7.3 percent of its total trade, and it provides huge opportunities for British entrepreneurs. Whereas Britain imports about twice as much from China as it exports, its supply chains for vital products, including antibiotics and antivirals, are highly integrated with the Chinese economy. Britain is also heavily reliant on China for such things as clothes, consumer goods, office machinery and telecoms, and business services account for 45 percent of imports in the services sector.

However much, therefore, she wants to please the US, it is suicidal for Truss to compound Britain’s economic meltdown by poisoning yet further its relationship with China. Quite clearly, Britain will be the big loser if Truss insists on cutting off its nose to spite its face, something of which her predecessors, David Cameron and Theresa May, were always acutely aware.

Even Boris Johnson, whose valedictory advice to his successor on July 20 was to “stay close to the Americans”, favoured enhanced trading links with China, and he only revoked Huawei’s role in Britain’s 5G mobile network in 2020 after the US applied the thumbscrews.

There are, however, now ideologues within the Conservative Party who speak openly about decoupling the UK from China, and their hand has been strengthened with Truss’ election. Although once dismissed as crazies, Truss cannot be trusted to resist them, and some may even enter her government. She has a long record of pandering to party fanatics, most notably over Hong Kong, and this strongly suggests they will now expect to dictate her China agenda.

Extraordinary crisis

Expectations of Truss’s cabinet are, moreover, very low. The Observer’s former editor-in-chief, Will Hutton, said last week that “we watch on hopelessly as Truss prepares to form a cabinet populated by misfits, failures, ideologues, third-raters and opportunists to manage one of the greatest economic and social emergencies since 1945”. He even prophesied that her cabinet would be “a titanic constitutional and democratic failure”.

As the UK faces an extraordinary crisis, its friends will wish it well, but it is hugely worrying that the British people find themselves in the hands of a political lightweight. Truss lacks not only vision but also competence, and this is a classic case of lions being led by donkeys. Although, if her record is anything to go by, she will be an entirely negative factor in world affairs, events will hopefully bring her to her senses. She needs to understand that, if Britain is to survive its economic woes, she must place the interests of its people above her grandstanding, however much it upsets Washington.

Bigotry, blunders and bluster

It will, of course, be difficult for somebody whose career has been fashioned by bigotry, blunders and bluster to provide any true leadership, but Truss can at least try. In the meantime, everybody who admires the UK and wants it to prosper will hopefully cut it some slack, and not be wholly alienated by her manic posturing. If properly governed, Britain still has much to offer the world, and its revival cannot forever be stifled by mediocrities.

The sad truth, however, is that, as things stand, there is little to suggest that Truss is made of the right stuff or can rise to the challenges her country faces. Unless, therefore, she gets real, the biggest beneficiary of her succession, apart from the Sinophobes, is likely to be the opposition Labor Party, whose leader, Sir Keir Starmer, is, say the pollsters, set fair to win the forthcoming general election, due by 2024.

Grenville Cross

Grenville Cross is a senior counsel, law professor and criminal justice analyst, and was previously the director of public prosecutions of the Hong Kong SAR. He has been awarded the Gold Bauhinia Star which is the highest Bauhinia Star rank in the honours system of Hong Kong, created in 1997 to replace the British honours system of the Order of the British Empire after the transfer of sovereignty to People’s Republic of China and the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

Britain’s opium era strategy to deal with China - Pearls and Irritations

Fucking hell, he's even whining about Queen Victoria now, and she's been dead for 120 years.

What a wanker.

China is fuelling the opiate crisis with fentanyl, yet they don't seem to want to ban the precursors used to make it. Fuck China.

Oh how the worm turns.

^
You seem happy about it. Says a lot about you.

I have a sense of irony. You seem incapable of humour. Says a lot about you.

Originally Posted by pickel

You seem happy about it. Says a lot about you.

He has shown his true colors many times on here. I will not soon forget the times he cheered on the Russians as they committed atrocities in Ukraine. He attempted to claim that the Bucha massacre was a hoax, faked by the Ukrainians. He is a massive scumbag.

Then stop selling arnaments to Mexican drug cartels, and your selected Terrorist causes du jour. Or admit you are a massive hypocrite.

Oh, and if you want to send an emissary to China to appeal to their sense of honor, and cease supplying some of the base chemicals that are synthesised into fentanyl- be sure to send a brit.

Originally Posted by sabang

I have a sense of irony. You seem incapable of humour. Says a lot about you.

I live in the city that is the epicenter of the opiate crisis in Canada. Trust me, it's not humorous. It's also not Britain, you ignorant tool.

sabang seems to be losing what little of the plot he had left.

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

sabang seems to be losing what little of the plot he had left.

He does seem a bit more stressed since he came back from Pattaya. Not sure if it's because he knows he won't have sex for a long time now, or because Putin is losing, or because Xi hasn't invaded Taiwan. Maybe all three?

Originally Posted by pickel

because Putin is losing, or because Xi hasn't invaded Taiwan.

His whole paradigm is collapsing right before his own eyes. That would tend to piss a person off.

Really? When the real winner from this war is China? [P'ssst, yes it's a China thread]

Originally Posted by sabang

When the real winner from this war is China?

You can be exceedingly dim at times. Russia and China are the big losers in regard to this war. Both of their militaries rely on most of the same shitty weapons and equipment, as well as sharing a close military doctrine. Lots of further ramifications in that. But without a doubt, the US and NATO are the big winners.

You are such a dimwit. Have you not noticed the precipitous fall in the Euro and Sterling, and that Europe and the USA are in recession?
Meanwhile, both China and India are benefitting from cheap, stable energy supply. Stick to war porn- it's what you do best.

Originally Posted by pickel

He does seem a bit more stressed since he came back from Pattaya. Not sure if it's because he knows he won't have sex for a long time now

I think he's still having sex. Just not with anyone else.