How serious is Taiwan for China? Dead Serious. I was born and grew up in Taiwan. Not everyone from Taiwan is a moron, you know. 台灣對中國有多重要? 很重要. 我在台灣出生和長大。 不是每個台灣人都是白痴，你知道嗎. By Chiu Yu PhD in Physical Sciences, Major US University • Nov 14 2021
The link I am including at the end substantiates my answer well.
But before that, I am curious about one question regarding those Westerners also answering this or similar questions by dismissing the significance of this issue to the Chinese psyche, just because it doesn’t seem like a big deal to them.
Where did you get the blind audacity to claim you understand the Chinese perspective? Do you even speak Chinese? How many Chinese history books and traditional literature, which have great bearing on the Chinese perspective, have you read and taken to heart? How much Chinese history of the past 500 years, which is even more critical in shaping the Chinese mindset on this, do you understand? How much do you follow the Chinese language media outside Western pseudo-news, like those in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, or even North America? I satisfy all the above criteria. And based on that, I gave my answer on the first line, substantiated in the link below.
You think you can just barge in and decide whether it is important to the Chinese based on your naive cost-effectiveness analysis, the way your mother-in-law decides whether her pizza joint is profitable?
If someone asks me, “Do American kids take Santa and the Tooth Fairy very serious?”, and if I answer “Oh, Nah, the kids think it is all bullshit!”, then I am being culturally ignorant, arrogant, chauvinistic, and audacious, and should be criticized and castigated as such.
Who gave you your audacity?
So maybe one should, to put it politely, just keep his quiet and not pretend he knows how important any such issue is to the Chinese, or Russian, or Arab, or Indian, or whomever, if he cannot produce proofs I listed above other than his crappy cost analysis learned from a third rate MBA school.
Actually this is advice for your own good. Just look at what happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Syria, Bahrain, etc.
I recently came across a book by a remarkable person named Danny A. Sjursen, a West Point graduate, US Army Major who has taught at West Point and served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among other points he talked about, one is how little Americans, and I believe unfortunately more and more Europeans as well, know about the history of the world, and seem to think this ignorance can be compensated by some kind of blind patriotism. He is terrified by the fiascos in the making due to this ignorance (what a timely observation!)! One interesting thing he said is that this view of his is shared by his fellow teachers at West Point!
I am trying to convey the same message here. The general average Westerner perceives other cultures in his own image and is too lazy and ignorant to imagine there can be people who do not think as he does. It is very sad.
BEIJING, Nov 21 (Reuters) – Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai had a video call on Sunday with the president of the International Olympic Committee and told him she was safe and well, the IOC said, after Western governments expressed mounting concern for her well-being.
Photos and videos of Peng at a children’s tournament in Beijing published earlier in the day had done little to quell that unease, following a nearly three-week public absence after she alleged that a former senior Chinese official sexually assaulted her.
In a statement, the IOC said Peng began the 30-minute call with its president Thomas Bach by thanking the Olympic organization for its concern.
“She explained that she is safe and well, living at her home in Beijing, but would like to have her privacy respected at this time,” the IOC’s statement said.
“That is why she prefers to spend her time with friends and family right now. Nevertheless, she will continue to be involved in tennis, the sport she loves so much.”
NYT is scraping bottom of the barrel by lying about this post by Peng in order to discredit China and generate public support for boycotting the Beijing winter Olympics. The usual western media and politician suspects piled on, along with many so-called tennis stars of the western world joining the chorus and propagating the NYT lie.
One of my friends said it best. Peng is naïve to post her affair with a high Chinese official. This became a public scandal which was promptly used by the US for public opinion manipulation. I think she is now regretting what she did. It is dangerous to post your dirty secrets on the internet. She is naïve and full of hate for being abandoned by her lover. Of course what Zhang Gaoli did is also deplorable. But this type of sexual scandal involving government officials is common in the west and is no big deal.
Professor Ling-chi Wang of UC Berkeley: Thanks for circulating the long piece on the disappearance of Chinese tennis player, Peng Shua,i from the Moon of Alabama.
The NY Times’s despicable behavior in its reporting of Peng Shuai’s alleged disappearance is rather standard, routine, and normal! “All the news that’s fit to print!” Is its motto. Its publisher and editors have neither shame nor remorse.
I think the readers of the paper should demand the NYT retracts its coverage of the case and apologize to both Peng herself, its readers, and China. It is amazing how it can create and spread a lie and.sadly, the world fell for it. Remember how the Western MSM spread the news that Jiang Zemin had died a few years ago. He is still alive and he even showed up last month at the 100th anniversary of the CCP recently. What about the wild speculations over Jack Ma’s recent disappearance after the government appropriately took actions to curb Alibaba’s insatiable appetite for expansion and control through acquisitions and mergers. Later, he showed up in Spain and Italy relaxed and having fun. Another recent fictional invention is the Uighur concentration camps and genocide.
The obvious intention of the NYT is to continue its relentless demonization of China and to create a worldwide boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics in February 2022.
Prestigious Weaponry Expert Censored After Demonstrating that a Deadly Poison Gas Attack—Blamed on the Syrian Government—Was Really a False-Flag Operation by U.S.-Funded Terrorists By Jeremy Kuzmarov Nov 22, 2021
Top MIT Scientist Was Subject to Defamatory Attacks and Had Article Exposing Truth About Alleged Syrian Chemical Weapons Attacks Pulled by Prestigious Scientific Journal
Fearful editors and CIA-connected hacks ganged up to defame top MIT scientist who refused to echo government propaganda. Instead, he quit his 30-year job on principle.
Theodore Postol is one of the world’s leading authorities on warfare and weaponry. A physicist with a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering, he is Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and International Security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a former top policy adviser to the chief of naval operations….
Professor Postol was also a senior editorial board member of the Princeton-based Science & Global Security journal for more than 30 years—until he quit in protest over the journal’s refusal to publish an article he wrote that embarrassed the CIA and the U.S. government.
San Francisco Bay Area is getting the wrong kind of famous. News is going around the world about our lawlessness society. 美國和舊金山灣區陽名天下, 我們無法無天的社會新聞正在世界各地傳播.
SCMP Columnist: My Take – Western journos are truth-seekers, Chinese hacks are spies by Alex Lo
Call it double standard or an unspoken reporting rule in the mainstream Anglo-American press that Chinese journalists and academics who are investigated, detained, expelled, denied a visa or otherwise harassed by their Western host countries don’t deserve a free-press defence
“I knew some of the people involved,” said Nury Vittachi, the prominent Hong Kong journalist and author, “and the allegations were just ridiculous.” He was referring to the US Justice Department’s demand, in late August, for five American subsidiaries of Sing Tao newspaper to register as foreign agents. The newspaper is Hong Kong’s oldest in the Chinese language. I subscribe to its Canadian edition, read it every day and find it quite innocuous. Maybe the American versions are different, full of Chinese state propaganda and run by Chinese intelligence operatives. You never know! In his YouTube clip on the channel Fridayeveryday, Vittachi refers to other incidents of Western state censorship and expulsion of Chinese journalists and academics. Strangely, he points out, you rarely hear about them.
The United States had limited visas for Chinese journalists to 90 days and stopped renewing them from May last year. However, China and the US have agreed to ease restrictions on foreign journalists working in the two countries following the virtual summit between presidents Xi Jinping and Joe Biden last week.
Last year, Australia cancelled the visas of Chen Hong, director of the Australian studies centre at East China Normal University in Shanghai, and Li Jianjun, also the director of the Australian studies centre at Beijing Foreign Studies University. Last June, agents of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) raided the home of the former head of Sydney’s Xinhua News Agency bureau, scared the living daylights out of his young daughter and confiscated electronic devices. The spy agency turned up nothing.
They also investigated the Australian bureau chief of China News Service (CNS) Tao Shelan and the Sydney bureau chief for China Radio International (CRI), Li Dayong.
If it were done in China, it would have been denounced as state intimidation and caused international outrage. In Britain, three Chinese journalists were expelled last year. In February, the licence of the Chinese state broadcaster CGTN to operate in the UK was revoked.
Since they were all Chinese, they must be spies or criminals. They got what they deserved. But a reporter, Sue-Lin Wong, an Australian citizen, from the august British publication, The Economist, was denied visa renewal in Hong Kong last week. Now that’s big diplomatic and international news. What outrage! Thankfully, the Western mainstream news media again rises to the occasion and makes sure everyone knows about it.
Alex Lo has been a Post columnist since 2012, covering major issues affecting Hong Kong and the rest of China. A journalist for 25 years, he has worked for various publications in Hong Kong and Toronto as a news reporter and editor. He has also lectured in journalism at the University of Hong Kong.
This is a recent in depth interview with Schell on China (transcript and interview) I think he represents a large sector of elite views on China, and in particular in Xi Jinping
I think, though, that he is fairly representative of the mainstream of American academic attitudes about China. I think many people who were supporters of China in the ‘60s have had a hard time updating their consciousness. The idea that China simply went down the capitalist road took deep roots in the ‘80s, and the fashion of denouncing both China and the US as somehow equivalently problematic became the dominant perspective. How this has also been shaped by funding agencies and universities, etc, is perhaps also a question. The group Critical China Scholars is a good example of these tendencies. It should really be called Scholars Critical of China, but they think of themselves as progressives who maintain some kind of intellectual purity by looking down on both American imperialism and what they see as a capitalist and exploitive China.
I think many academics bought into the idea, too, that a “democratic” transition in China would be a good thing. I know some colleagues at schools across the country who have continued to see China more clearly, but who largely keep their views to themselves in the national climate of the past decade or so. I find all this rather disheartening. Schell clearly has no problem speaking out about his criticisms and objectively serving the interests of American capital.
I agree that the American elites are primarily concerned with maintaining the power of the U.S. as global hegemony. The foundational principle of American foreign policy is that a country which is open to U.S. capital is good, while a country which resists the penetration of U.S. capital is bad. Saudi Arabia good; Iran bad. Bangladesh good; Myanmar bad. Etc. But I do also think there is an ideological dimension to the antagonism between the U.S. and China, as there is with Cuba. The socialist vision of economic just and equality is antithetical to the American fantasy of free market capitalism. Not that the U.S. is actually a free market system, but that is the dominant false consciousness. The developing practical success of an alternative vision in China, with Xi Jinping promoting “common prosperity” and pursuing actually effective policies against poverty and the excesses of private businesses and their owners, threatens the continuing dominance of the corporate and political elites which have enriched themselves at the expense of everyone else. So I think it is a blend of the zero-sum mentality of seeing China’s rise as America’s decline and a realization of the profound difference of China’s political economic system and the threat to Elie power it constitutes which shapes the anti-China monster of American politics these days. Schell articulates this anxiety in the trappings of academic discourse.
Professor John V Walsh, MD in San Francisco:
I would add two; In the 60s an entire generation of males was threatened by the draft, and everyone in that generation turned against the War. And with that came a marked shift to the left by that generation.Everyone was against the War – even Bill Clinton!!As this threat receded, it became ever more acceptable in that generation to slip rightward – and there were career and financial rewards to do so.I suspect that is exactly what happened to Schell.
Second, I agree that there is an ideological overlay to the US assault on China – but it is just that, an overlay. Wolfowitz clarified it best – and he made no mention of ideology. And in fact why the antagonism to Russia, hardly a socialist country but one that is very protective of its sovereignty from past and recent historical experience?As far as penetration of US capital being the key, it seems that the Imperial Elite are trying to hinder US capital going to China but the bankers and hedge funds (Goldman Sachs and Blackrock, as examples) and big biz people (Apple and Tesla as examples) are anxious to do more business there.
At least that is how I see it.
KJ:
My two cents: I think Orville Hickok Schell Jr. has had an interesting life trajectory, characterized most significantly by spinelessness, shifty ethics, and moral turpitude. He grew up in the family of Helsinki watch co-founder, his father and lawyer, Orville Schell. Helsinki watch was founded on a 400K grant from the Ford Foundation, and was created to wage information warfare against the Soviet Union by weaponizing human rights. It later morphed into Human Rights Watch (with a boost from the Soros Foundation), i.e. (Apple, Tree, Fall). I’ve stated before that Schell was in Jakarta, Indonesia. He states more recently that he was there momentarily then left quickly, like the [film] “year of living dangerously”. In that he hints he knows that bad things were afoot. He was actually there for 2 years, 1964-1966, at exactly the time the Indonesian mass genocide was happening, when the blood was literally running rivers in the streets and the screams of torture were curdling the soul. 1-3 million innocents were tortured and massacred during this period, so the US could roll back a left-leaning government and appropriate Indonesia’s mineral and natural wealth for its corporations.
Schell worked for the Ford Foundation, which was an arm of the CIA, and Ford was instrumental in training the Indonesian military that committed this genocide. There’s a deafening silence–a total void–in his writings or reflections about this period. Still, we can see this manifesting in tortuous, odd patterns in the rest of his life. Others have already mentioned his close affiliation with human sewer rats like Harry Wu or Larry Diamond. But there are other curiosities: after helming UC Berkeley’s sausage-making journalism machine, he operated–I kid you not–a slaughterhouse–a “humane”, liberal-sensitive, organic one–but a slaughterhouse nevertheless. He also jumped into the last bastion of respectable liberal White racism–environmentalism–,an extraordinary irony given that the Indonesian genocide he enabled resulted in the neocolonial corporate decimation of Indonesia’s pristine jungles.
But above all, I see his repressed guilt in his constant projection onto China, the occluded, genocidal violence that he enabled projected onto the Asian other: Tibet, Xinjiang, HK; his lack of scruples projected onto Xi Jinping: he sees in others what he cannot face in the bloodied mirror: immorality, cowardice; fickle, corrupted loyalty; immense, unbridled savagery.
I’m also struck by the triviality of his writing and observations–his wikipedia-profound prognostications of the “loss of the mandate of heaven”. Or his claim in “Coming Home” that Bach and Mao (in his mind, Western enlightenment and Asian Despotism) can’t coexist.
He believes the moral, spiritual force of classical music cannot coexist with violence, and in that it is superior to the Chinese.This is trivial and stupid. Even without lending credence to this silly idea, the Nazis loved classical music, especially Bach and Beethoven, and played it at crematoria as Jews were being led to slaughter.
He claims, in his perplexed, twilight hours, that he has started a “new career in fiction”, the better to “tell–like Albert Camus–the deeper truths that only fiction can tell”. This is insulting claptrap. I believe he has always been an amoral, confabulating raconteur.
He has always written cheap, pulp fiction.
This is the first time he has honestly admitted to it.
Johnson Choi Biz 