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The “Little Chinese” People of Yesteryear No More
Beijing, China, February 15th, 2018
Salaroche
This old world keeps spinning around and human behavior continues to evolve with it, sometimes for better, sometimes for naught, sometimes forward, sometimes not, but always with different hues. The concepts that guided our societies yesterday are not necessarily the ones that guide them today, even as they are all always within that range of behavior that our human condition inevitably dictates on us.
For example, those "Little Chinese" that under deplorable working conditions built American railroads in the mid-nineteenth century, those that by the end of the same century had to submit themselves by brute force to the will of the British Empire (see Boxer Rebellion, 1899-1901) and that during some subsequent years had to endure the criminal abuses of the Japanese Empire (1931-1945), they are not the same Chinese people of the 21st century.
A good number of present-day Chinese have the following unspoken pact with their government: "I grant you my freedom of expression and I quietly accept the limitations you impose on my daily life provided that you give me the opportunity to improve my living conditions and those of my family, that you give me the social and political stability necessary to do so and that you give me the pride of knowing that the world not only respects China, but that it is increasingly submitted to our will"
Largely because of its untoward past as a "colonized country”, China's current successful economic impetus contains a considerable element of revenge against the West, an almost-obsessive desire to show the world that its millenary culture is superior to any other and that its system of authoritarian government is much more efficient and reliable than all others, above all far superior to the so-called "Democratic" system that supposedly exists in the United States (please remember that the blatantly undemocratic US Electoral College arbitrarily allows for millions of votes to be annulled in the country's presidential elections without any recourse to remedy such failure [see US Elections 2016])
Here in China, the idea of "American Democracy" is often subject to laughter, scorn and derision and the idea of a unitary and centralized government (with some rights to autonomy at the provincial level) is mostly lauded as non plus ultra, first because the Chinese see the political pandemonium that presently reigns in the US under the chaotic Trump administration and second because the Chinese government continues to fulfill the promises it made to its people in the unspoken pact mentioned in a previous paragraph.
Viewed from the perspective of such reality, anyone thinking (as many “Trumpers” seem to think) that the "Little Chinese" of our day are some ± 1,400 million fools guided by a government composed of idiots willing to submit themselves to the whims of a US Ambassador to the United Nations is most likely suffering from heavy hallucinations probably resulting from one of those racial prejudices that have traditionally abounded in American society and in some others.
In less than 40 years the "Little Chinese" of our days have forged for themselves the No. 2 position among the economies of the world (see Deng, Xiaoping), just one degree below the US economy and they are about to take over the No. 1 place probably in the next 15 years.
"One day we are going to dictate to the world what to do," say some of those "Little Chinese" that some Westerners tend to underestimate and as things keep unfolding this is already happening at an industrial level.
Just look at how Apple recently surrendered to the Chinese government access to all the information circulating within China in Apple's much-announced iCloud platform, which amounts to a total capitulation of the concept of free speech and privacy that is such a fundamental part of the idea of democracy that we Westerners like to throw on the Chinese people’s face as proof of our sociopolitical superiority.
And what happened to the issue of currency manipulation that the Chinese so blatantly continue to engage in? What happened to the idea of denouncing them at the WTO as currency manipulators? Nothing. Pure blah, blah, blah ... No country with a responsible Prime Minister, Chancellor or President (not even the US under Trump) would dare to unleash a trade war with China.
To a certain degree, therefore, the Chinese are already dictating to the world what we can or cannot do. At this point in time the idea of China as a navel-gazing "Communist" country is already quite worn-out and out of fashion. The least that exists on this land is any sort of social distribution of national goods. Currently China is nothing but a capitalist country with a single-party authoritarian government (with totalitarian tones) centralized and with a state-controlled economy. And as a good US-style capitalist country, China is also patently elitist.
This old world does indeed keep spinning around and human behavior does keep evolving along with it. China is no longer today what it used to be barely 50 years ago. The “Little Chinese” People of Yesteryear are No More
The following link leads to a few of my China photo albums:
http://www.salaroche.com/Photos.html
Salaroche
