Nostr Web Client

Trade with China since the 80s has not included the voluntary labor of the Chinese people. They have been forced to accept paper promises (local currency) while the state has squandered the vast majority of the real value they should have earned. Immigration restrictions have kept workers unable to arbitrage their labor, and financial restrictions have prevented them from earning a fair return on any accumulated capital. This situation has primarily benefited Chinese and western elites.

gsovereignty 2y ago

I've seen first hand how China has developed over the last 20 years and I don't think that's an accurate assessment.

The increase in the standard of living has been mind blowing, as is the percentage of humanity that has been lifted out of poverty.

20 years ago if you asked 100 people on the street in china what the biggest problem with being Chinese is, the answer was almost unanimously that there's no dignity in being Chinese. This is no longer the case, and the importance and relevance of this is massively under appreciated by people outside of China.

It's also important to put things in historical/political/philosophical context:

- China is a civilization state, most of the west is not.

- Chinese culture is primarily a tug of war between confucianism and daoism. The western world is mostly post-enlightenment rationalism.

- You wont find many Chinese people who'd want to go back to any other point in Chinese history over the last 1000 years because this is the best it's ever been.

- The biggest fear that the average Chinese person has (aside from cold water) is political instability.

- The western world has been going through a process of manufacturing consent for xyz, it appears on the surface to be aimed at starting a war with china, but IMO it's actually for a war against the western pleb, "we need these powers because china/russia", e.g. the recent attempts to restrict access to certain apps or data.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

Mike Dilger ☑️ 2y ago

That all fits with my understanding. Except your opinion at the end that the manufacturing of consent (great book btw) is only facially about China but actually against the Western pleb. I think instead that power always seeks more power (against the Western pleb, yes) but also seeks to neutralize threats to it's power, which realistically is the Chinese state. So IMHO it is both. I take John Mearsheimer's view on this.

If you are concerned about great risks to humanity such as climate change, nuclear war, gain of function research, or the emergence of out of control general A.I., then you should consider that the only approaching-reliable way of containing those risks is for humanity to cooperate on them worldwide. That means that in at least some sense the West should be maintaining friendly relationships with China, not posturing for war. Because in a war posture there is no hope of containing their research which becomes a desperate attempt to win. E.g. we need to make hyper-intelligent missiles... oops! or we need to make a bioweapon... oops! Etc.

Now more than ever before we need to normalize relations and cooperate. The battle for power seems so childish to me in the face of the real threats.