Mao with money
The October 30 issue of The New Yorker has a piece on Xi’s China called “China’s Age of Malaise.” While the mainstream media continues to promote the idea that China has become a wellspring of creativity and economic competition, the reality is that China is retreating into the rigid, sclerotic political dogmatism that characterized the Mao era and that brought down the Soviet Union. The money grafs:
“Early this year, the Party launched a campaign to educate citizens on what Party literature habitually refers to as “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.” All manner of institutions—laboratories, asset-management firms, banks, think tanks—are expected to make time for regular lectures, followed by the writing of essays and the taking of tests. Some business executives report spending a third of the workday on “thought work,” including reading an average of four books a month. A microchip engineer at a university lab told a friend, “Going to meetings every day literally eats away at the time for scientific discoveries.”
“The over-all effect is a revival of what the late Sinologist Simon Leys called the “lugubrious merry-go-round” of Communist ritual, and a culture of deliberate obfuscation that he likened to deciphering “inscriptions written in invisible ink on blank pages.” The return of disappearances and thought work on this scale has made clear that, for all of China’s modernizations, Xi is no longer pantomiming the rule of law; he has returned China to the rule of man. At his core, a longtime observer told me, Xi is “Mao with money.””
China’s Age of Malaise
While the mainstream media continues to promote the idea that China has become a wellspring of creativity and economic competition, the reality is that China is retreating into the rigid, sclerotic political dogmatism that characterized the Mao era and that brought down the Soviet Union….
[ This is shockingly false and malicious. ]
@ltr,
Well, the ‘shocked’ reaction was predictable. Other than the fact that it offends your mythology, please cite the passages in the New Yorker article that are false and/or malicious, and your evidence. Take all the time you need.
Take all the time you need.
[ Any time taken would be too much. Crude prejudice only needs to be dismissed. The New Yorker only wants to take readers back to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to 1943. ]
@ltr,
So you didn’t read the New Yorker article and have no idea what it says, so you resort to gaslighting. Color me unsurprised.
You could tell this was coming when Xi stepped in. There’s a conflict between having a dynamic business community and an autocratic government. The rule for enlightened despots is that they are fine for the first two terms, maybe 8-10 years, then they have to crack down or they lose touch. In either case, anything dynamic is suppressed.
@Kaleberg,
And now that he’s seized power for life, the future in China is bleak. No wonder there’s a brain drain; young people in China want a future.
For 10 yrs and more now, Chinese money has poured into the SF Bay Area/California. One had the feeling that it was either smart money or dirty money, or both.
The New Yorker article on the Chinese fishing fleet was no less than damning.
@Ken,
Yes, agree on the Chinese fishing, their abuse of natural resources and their abuse of the crews. I hadn’t realized how much fish here is sourced through China. We’ve already been eating farmed salmon. I’ll be adding more trout and tilapia, and avoiding tuna and cod.
Bigger than the fish. I haven’t taken inventory but have spent enough time in health-food stores, quasi (big-box) health-food stores and just everyday run-of-the-mill stores to note that pretty much everything on the shelf is sourced to China and that “organic” or “natural” label isn’t gonna’ change that. China and Mexico
Which isn’t necessarily to denigrate the products, they tend to be higher-end products than the ultra-processed name brands but never-the-less they are processed, and most likely not here
Fish is (to me) the most obvious …
Alas…
Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
An observation that a person’s sense of morality lessens as his or her power increases. The statement was made by Lord Acton, a British historian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Not looking forward to a resumption of the Trump reign, BTW.
And now that he’s seized power for life, the future in China is bleak. No wonder there’s a brain drain; young people in China want a future.
[ This is of course false and malicious; over and over and over. The point being to show disdain for a 5,000 year old thoroughly benign and wonderful civilization of 1.4 billion. ]
@ltr,
Please point out what is false and malicious about my post. Take all the time you need.
I’m sure that Tibetans, Vietnamese and Uighurs disagree that China is thoroughly benign. Then there are the millions of Chinese that suffered and died during Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” and “Cultural Revolution.” And now the hundreds of Chinese citizens who are being disappeared. I know you’re proud of that, but most civilized people don’t share your new and unfamiliar definitions of “benign” and “wonderful.”
Somewhere there is a Lin Biao waiting and scheming. The PLA is a little different than our perceptions of how a military operates but when flag officers start getting arrested, you’ll make some powerful enemies. Zhang Youxia maybe?
@lj,
Things didn’t end well for Lin Biao. He wrote an endorsement in the front matter of my copy of the Little Red Book, but that relationship wasn’t sustainable. Stalin wasn’t the only dictator who governed via periodic purges.