Are you ready to suit up and fight those evil ChiComs over Taiwan’s inalienable right to secede from China? I’m just joking. It is not like you are even eligible to serve in the U.S. military anyway.
“One day in August 2021, Zhao Wei disappeared. For one of China’s best-known actresses to physically vanish from public view would have been enough to cause a stir on its own. But Zhao’s disappearing act was far more thorough: overnight, she was erased from the internet. Her Weibo social media page, with its 86 million followers, went offline, as did fan sites dedicated to her. Searches for her many films and television shows returned no results on streaming sites. Zhao’s name was scrubbed from the credits of projects she had appeared in or directed, replaced with a blank space. Online discussions uttering her name were censored. Suddenly, little trace remained that the 45-year-old celebrity had ever existed.
She wasn’t alone. Other Chinese entertainers also began to vanish as Chinese government regulators announced a “heightened crackdown” intended to dispense with “vulgar internet celebrities” promoting lascivious lifestyles and to “resolve the problem of chaos” created by online fandom culture. Those imitating the effeminate or androgynous aesthetics of Korean boyband stars—colorfully referred to as “xiao xian rou,” or “little fresh meat”—were next to go, with the government vowing to “resolutely put an end to sissy men” appearing on the screens of China’s impressionable youth.
Zhao and her unfortunate compatriots in the entertainment industry were caught up in something far larger than themselves: a sudden wave of new government policies that are currently upending Chinese life in what state media has characterized as a “profound transformation” of the country. Officially referred to as Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “Common Prosperity” campaign, this transformation is proceeding along two parallel lines: a vast regulatory crackdown roiling the private sector economy and a broader moralistic effort to reengineer Chinese culture from the top down.
But why is this “profound transformation” happening? And why now? Most analysis has focused on one man: Xi and his seemingly endless personal obsession with political control. The overlooked answer, however, is that this is indeed the culmination of decades of thinking and planning by a very powerful man—but that man is not Xi Jinping. …
What he found deeply disturbed him, permanently shifting his view of the West and the consequences of its ideas.
Wang recorded his observations in a memoir that would become his most famous work: the 1991 book America Against America. In it, he marvels at homeless encampments in the streets of Washington DC, out-of-control drug crime in poor black neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco, and corporations that seemed to have fused themselves to and taken over responsibilities of government. Eventually, he concludes that America faces an “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis” produced by its societal contradictions, including between rich and poor, white and black, democratic and oligarchic power, egalitarianism and class privilege, individual rights and collective responsibilities, cultural traditions and the solvent of liquid modernity.
But while Americans can, he says, perceive that they are faced with “intricate social and cultural problems,” they “tend to think of them as scientific and technological problems” to be solved separately. This gets them nowhere, he argues, because their problems are in fact all inextricably interlinked and have the same root cause: a radical, nihilistic individualism at the heart of modern American liberalism. …”
I complain about this all the time here.
This is what I mean by “modernism.” It isn’t so much an ideology as it is a decadent sensibility which comes from the avant-garde to despise the past and tradition and tear everything down guided by the values of cultural liberation and social equality. It is a variant of liberalism which emerged in this country in Greenwich Village in the years before World War I at the end of the Victorian era.
The 19th century American bourgeois had a different set of values in the Victorian era. They were frugal and productive. They were religious. They were comfortable with racial equality and sexual division. You could say that “modernism” is a sensibility geared toward a later stage of capitalism and rose with the advertising industry in the early 20th century to encourage consumption.
“From the smug point of view of millions who now inhabit the Chinese internet, Wang’s dark vision of American dissolution was nothing less than prophetic. When they look to the U.S., they no longer see a beacon of liberal democracy standing as an admired symbol of a better future. That was the impression of those who created the famous “Goddess of Democracy,” with her paper-mâché torch held aloft before the Gate of Heavenly Peace.
Instead, they see Wang’s America: deindustrialization, rural decay, over-financialization, out of control asset prices, and the emergence of a self-perpetuating rentier elite; powerful tech monopolies able to crush any upstart competitors operating effectively beyond the scope of government; immense economic inequality, chronic unemployment, addiction, homelessness, and crime; cultural chaos, historical nihilism, family breakdown, and plunging fertility rates; societal despair, spiritual malaise, social isolation, and skyrocketing rates of mental health issues; a loss of national unity and purpose in the face of decadence and barely concealed self-loathing; vast internal divisions, racial tensions, riots, political violence, and a country that increasingly seems close to coming apart.
As a tumultuous 2020 roiled American politics, Chinese people began turning to Wang’s America Against America for answers. And when a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021, the book flew off the shelves. Out-of-print copies began selling for as much as $2,500 on Chinese e-commerce sites. …
And it’s why celebrities like Zhao Wei have been disappearing, why Chinese minors have been banned from playing the “spiritual opium” of video games for more than three hours per week, why LGBT groups have been scrubbed from the internet, and why abortion restrictions have been significantly tightened. As one nationalist article promoted across state media explained, if the liberal West’s “tittytainment strategy” is allowed to succeed in causing China’s “young generation lose their toughness and virility then we will fall…just like the Soviet Union did.” The purpose of Xi’s “profound transformation” is to ensure that “the cultural market will no longer be a paradise for sissy stars, and news and public opinion will no longer be in a position of worshipping Western culture.”
Wang Huning has seen the real America.
The natives are not allowed to notice things like that here.
It is also only a matter of time before this country collapses due its own loss of social cohesion, internal divisions and the decline in trust in institutions and legitimacy of our ruling class. I think it is far too late for us now to reverse course and avoid that outcome. It is not to late for China to avoid hitting the wall.
China will eat our lunch.
Watch. USA will flex, and knowing what they know now about America’s weakness, they will call the bluff.
America will be humiliated.
It will be glorious.
@drogger – It won’t be so “glorious” if you are an American.
There is one nursery rhyme I learned as a schoolboy which has popped into my head repeatedly during all the corona Wuhan malarkey:
Ching-Chong Chinaman went to milk a cow
Ching-Chong Chinaman didn’t know how
Ching-Chong Chinaman pulled the wrong tit
Ching-Ching Chinaman got covered in shit
“””….when a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021, the book flew off the shelves. Out-of-print copies began selling for as much as $2,500 on Chinese e-commerce sites. …”””
So dumb fucks did not ruined their lives for nothing but those people changed the world ?
Perhaps they did change the world – just not in the way they thought they would. I would take Chinese overlords any day over the present Satanic Jewish ones. Tell you one thing I never saw when visiting China a few years ago. Ads featuring negro males with white females. There were zero dindus in ads there and damned few to be seen on the streets in a city of 28 million. There were quite a few whites in ads. Not as numerous as Chinese (to be expected) but more than you see in Murika.
@Exalted- The Chinese perhaps would have different propaganda techniques were they in control of the land mass that is America. What would they care about White sensibilities — we are not their people.
They pearl clutch about this Chinese woman being “unpersoned”, but this is happening all over the Internet with American right wing activists where Chase, Citi, Facebook, and Twitter all collude to unperson us.
Spare me.
John Gruden is the latest to get cancelled.
Did you see this one, Hunter?
https://www.reuters.com/technology/united-states-has-lost-ai-battle-china-pentagons-ex-software-chief-says-2021-10-11/
Pentagon’s former software chief says he quit because China already won the tech race and the USA is a joke because they only promote incompetent retards.
He says USA already lost on AI because the American companies are too concerned with “ethics.” In other words, all of their AI keeps turning out to be racist instead of woke so they dismantle it, lol.
Yeah, I saw it
You should definitely read the Wang Huning book (check out the link below). I am about a third of the way through the book. He is very insightful about human realities in general and American attitudes in particular. It would be interesting to see his comments about American 2021.
If there’s a war with China it won’t be close. The US will lose badly in a conventional war and to save face I believe the US will use nukes
The US won’t use nukes because the US will lose in a nuclear war too.
https://twitter.com/spawnofKahn/status/1425881225475018756
If there’s a conventional war with China over Taiwan the US will lose and lose badly because of all the wokeness and R.O.E. In order to save face the US will possibly use nukes.
Taiwan is 100% Shlomo occupied territory. I think I would take my chanced with the Chicoms if I were Taiwanese. Less likely to poison the water and give tranny porn to your kids in state mandated schools.
Taiwan is a different case than all of the stupid, horrible and evil military interventions the USA has taken over recent decades
It is different because there, the common people, really do want our Western protection for them
And more than most peoples, Taiwanese have been loyal friends to the USA and the West … it will forever be our dishonour if we abandon them, on the mistaken view we should now help no one
And tho we might applaud Beijing China’s moves to preserve much of trad culture there … the fact remains that their government is fundamentally totalitarian at core, without the structures for ‘breathing room’ we Western people crave as our own legacy
Japan is scared to death because they are next on the short list if Taiwan falls … we even have Russia now engaged in military activity near to Japan, to help China intimidate the Japanese
Not to mention that our other friends in the Philippines, and really all of Southeast Asia, are fearful of China as well
We need to draw a line there, and defend the Taiwanese to the fullest degree that they wish to be defended … Past American imperialism, is no excuse for letting Chinese imperialism ruin and conquer the best friends the West has ever had
The address for your local recruiting office is one internet search away … you go grrl.
One million Taiwanese zipperheads is not worth one drop of White blood.
Who’s “we,” Shlomo? You and I aren’t kin, and I couldn’t care less about your garbage empire. If Taiwan is a loyal ally of ZOG, that just means that it is an enemy of Whites. If anything Whites ought to be fighting for China to liberate Taiwan from American control.
@balticus – Absolute insanity.
China cannot be great if it is not good. Therefore another, even better, “People’s Cultural Revolution” (perhaps it is beginning now) is required to eradicate or subdue Capitalism in China and preserve the Han people’s “Socialism With Chinese Characteristics.” One of the worst morals-corrupting Western influences still present in China is Portuguese Catholic Macau, the world’s largest “sin city,” even bigger than Las Vegas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jW9iCu1aVZw
This is interesting: MOA commenter explains the Chinese “social credit system”: https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/10/why-do-editors-seek-dark-sides-of-china.html?cid=6a00d8341c640e53ef0282e1287364200b#comment-6a00d8341c640e53ef0282e1287364200b
Even under hybrid war attack by the U.S. empire, life is not “all work and no play” in a state that exists not for business profits but for the care of its people: A typical Chinese mother and daughter dance happily to “Light Clouds Cover the Moon”:
I had not noticed some irrelevant and non-working links in that MOA comment I cited. However the sense of it is that China’s system is public and open: all personal faults are explained fully and a damaged reputation is repairable, overcome by new, good social behavior restoring good social standing – whereas, under capitalism, personal reputation scoring is mostly a for-profit business, and mostly secretive and therefore often cannot be changed or corrected.
Wang has seen America, obviously. And so has Xi. He went to college here. In the State I am sitting in now, Iowa. So, l am sure he hates Yankees. Everyone with first hand experience does.
If it’s not these stupid trolls trying to sew discontent among Whites with Christian doctrines it’s them doing it with North vs South like it’s still 1860
So the chink government is doing what the jewS/corporate (((government))) is doing, only in their case, it’s done for the benefit of the people rather than their ruin.
Balticus- Really? Why bother? They’re all Asians, and xenoi. The overrunning of America by these folks is not to be desired by anyone. Let them stay where they are- let China rule her OWN people and let the gay Asian die a deserving death. Rice Christians are no Christians at all. ORION.
The book “American against America” can be downloaded free; the link is at https://angelanagle.substack.com/p/america-against-america. Or just run a Google search for “Wang Huning.” Wang Huning American Against America will then come up as a suggested result, and scrolling down will reveal the Nagle Substack containing the book link.
From the synopses of the book it appears Huning is the De Tocqueville of our times, accurately describing American as only a guest who doesn’t have to live here can do, speaking honestly about what he sees.
What has happened is that those who want to give the unknown future a chance (liberals and/or progressives) and those who want to maintain a status quo that for them has stood the test of time (conservatives/traditionalists) both can no longer be suppressed, as the culture and technology of the 21st century allows each group to act out their comfort level, without the other group being able to suppress their mirror image.
And because that is so, neither group feels the need to compromise by accepting a third party person or institution acting as arbitrator over the inevitable disputes that arise when opposites indulge their passions. That is, there is no Justice to mediate perceived wrongs, where sometimes the adventurers win and sometimes the preservationists do so.
Until this reality changes, life will continue to deteriorate until a trigger mechanism starts the War. Who wins will depend on many contingencies and acts of bravery and/or cowardice on both sides. Eventually, a new paradigm for living among disparate values and interests will emerge. Until then, be good to all you meet, and hope/pray, depending on your faith, if any, for survival.