-Venceu o Japão
-Acabou com tráfico de drogas
-Libertou escravos do Tibet
-Venceu os EUA na Coreia
-Alfabetização, saúde pública, direitos das mulheres
-Revolução Cultural
-Armou guerrilhas anticoloniais
-China virou superpotência nuclear
Como NÃO ser fascinado com Mao Tsé Tung?
China was never truly communist. It has always been pragmatic.
Too many people in the West treat “communist” as a single portable idea. It isn’t. The word covers half a dozen colliding things in economics, politics, anthropology, and history, and often the ideas are mutually incompatible. It’s so complicated that in my undergrad, Marxism was known as the densest of all the PPE modules, drier than even Kant.
On China the label is lazier still. No serious person takes it as anything more than a nameplate, much like how Brits keep "Empire" in their honours. Though the exception seems to be on the Hill, where “communist China” is still a verbal tic.
When the doctrine first reached China, it looked like a marvel. For a warlord-ravaged post-imperial realm circled by foreign powers, it looked like a real solution for delivering a better life. The first communists were not pitchforked rubes but the patriotic, bright, and often foreign-educated intellectuals, who thought they had found a modern instrument.
But the great experiement that eventually ran at a continental scale had failed. By 1959, at Lushan conference, the country was meant to reset course. That didn’t pan out and instead paved the way for one of the darkest chapters in the memory of our civilisation. The cultural revolution was cruelty incarnate. The name “communist” earned its stain there, and earned it fairly.
No one knows the cost better than we do. In the aftermaths China adopted a new formula "socialism with Chinese characteristics." The second half did the leg work, it referred to something that’s always been deep in our bones - pragmatism.
Pragmatism is focused on the ends, not the means; and we’ve learned from every Chinese polity that has lasted that the only ends that matter is prosperity. Ideologies are welcomed only insofar as they produce prosperity. People want better lives, and that’s concrete.
The habit of pragmatism runs through the people too. It is partly why we celebrate our engineers and doctors, professions that reward solving a problem over holding a position. It is also why we are among the most naturally entrepreneurial populations on earth - call it capitalist if you like. From capital markets to silk markets, tycoons to scalpers, everyone has a nose for an opening. (Regulators have a tough gig!)
So in reality, we are beyond socialism or capitalism. we are just pragmatic.
PS. naturally, a lot more can be said for each of the point here, but this is just an X post, not a full treatise.
China is about a decade and a half behind in developing cutting-edge chipmaking tools, according to a top executive at Germany’s Zeiss, a key supplier in the global semiconductor industry https://t.co/n2Xbwz3REi
Laura Bicker, BBC China correspondent, on the disaster at Gyirong Port on the Nepal–Xizang border: “Shocking footage isn’t being shown in China – and we know little about victims there.”
Numerous people in China have pointed out that the footage is, in fact, all over Chinese platforms; indeed, the very video in the BBC’s own report was released by the Chinese port authorities. So the sequence is: 1) the Chinese state published the clip; 2) the BBC ran the clip; 3) the BBC published a story about how the Chinese state is suppressing the clip.
@AndyBxxx has made another point worth noting: Chinese media doesn’t operate on the basis of “if it bleeds, it leads”. You won’t see grieving relatives and footage of bodies looped for 24 hours. The BBC treats the absence of disaster pornography as evidence of a cover-up rather than a different (and frankly much better) editorial culture.
The article concedes that Beijing has launched “a massive rescue operation involving hundreds of emergency workers”. Even the International Campaign for Tibet, an NED-sponsored Washington-based lobby group, is recorded here “praising the work of first responders”. Xi Jinping personally chaired an emergency meeting to coordinate it. Chinese media has provided “daily updates on the missing and the dead”, plus updates on the rescue operation and on the barrier lake at risk of overflowing. It has shown rescue teams scaling mountains and cliff faces and crossing raging rivers.
Premier Li Qiang was “quickly dispatched to the region” – a level of responsiveness from the top leadership that those of us in the West can only dream of. Compare for example the US response to Hurricane Katrina, or the British government’s response to the Grenfell disaster. From all of that, the article arrives at the phrase “muted response” 🤷🏽
The BBC reports that local CPC members have been asked to step up and help with relief efforts, and provide “emotional guidance or psychological support to affected residents”. This is predictably framed as an operation to “stem any signs of discontent”.
Our intrepid reporter finally reveals her motive with a single clause: “Tibet, which Beijing annexed in the 1950s”. A-ha. It turns out this is a story about British state media, not Chinese state media.
Tibet has been part of China since the 13th century. Taking advantage of the chaos of the collapse of the Qing dynasty, the British invaded Tibet in 1904, at which point they came up with the formula of recognising Chinese “suzerainty” over Tibet while asserting that the region was “independent in internal administration” – which de facto meant that the British could do whatever they wanted there. Incidentally, Britain didn’t abandon that formula until 2008, when it finally recognised China’s sovereignty over the region.
If the BBC is going to insist on a formulation of “Tibet, which Beijing annexed”, it should, for the sake of consistency, also refer to “Cornwall, which London annexed”, since this took place around the same time as Tibet’s absorption into the Yuan Dynasty.
The article goes on to repeat tired tropes about “the Chinese government oppressing and persecuting Tibetans”, albeit without going into the nature of this oppression, which includes raising literacy levels from 5 percent to 98 percent; 15 years’ publicly funded education; the highest per capita central government transfers in China; the elimination of absolute poverty; the provision of modern infrastructure, health care and social services; and impressive efforts to protect and promote Tibetan language and culture.
What doesn’t get a single mention is the cause of the disaster. This was a flash flood in the fastest-warming mountain range on earth, in a region where glacial lakes are multiplying and bursting. There is a genuine story here about climate change coming for the Himalayas and the hundreds of millions who depend on their rivers, but the BBC instead chooses to run with the usual anti-China rubbish.
Solidarity with the people of China and Nepal affected by this disaster, and with everyone working to save them. And shame on a state broadcaster that chooses slander over solidarity.