Video: Chinese democracy, Asian democracy, it works! But most racist Chinese haters never set foot in HK, Singapore or Shanghai to experience it. 中國民主，亞洲民主，行得通！ 但大多數仇視中國的種族主義者從未踏足香港、新加坡或上海去體驗它.
Scores of articles are discussing the shrinkage of Western liberal democracy around the world—and contrasting it with its alternative, authoritarianism, portrayed as a terrible system creating dystopian societies.
The trouble is that anyone who has travelled even a little bit quickly sees the dichotomy is completely fake. Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong – they may not count as Western liberal democracies, but its clearly ridiculous to portray them as dystopias. The fact is, some of the foundational texts of Western liberal democracy actually recommend a different option for places in Asia.
In his book On Liberty, published in 1869, John Stuart Mill says that liberal democracy is a good thing for everyone except for developing countries. For those, “Despotism” was “legitimate… provided the end be their improvement”.
In the 1940s, British colonial official Lord Malcolm Hailey said his country exercised power over Asia and Africa “as part of the movement for the betterment of the backward peoples of the world”.
Asia’s alternative system is sometimes defined in just two words. The classic Western formulation is “benign dictatorship”. Benign means kind. That was what British colonial leaders of Hong Kong liked to call their period of governance, in which a handful of foreigners made the decisions but held regular democratic consultations. Some political scientists prefer “illiberal democracy” or “consultative authoritarianism”. In China they like “full-process democracy”.
Spanish speakers use dictablanda and the Portuguese talk of ditabranda. These terms indicate leaders who are labelled dictators by outsiders but who are actually widely appreciated by their citizens. Xi Jinping’s China is clearly a ditabranda society.
Media commentators today can point their fingers at a system which combines strong leadership with consultative democracy and call it whatever they like. I just call them “Asian democracy”. It works.
Damaged Submarine USS Connecticut Appears In San Diego After Secret Journey From Guam. The covert journey across the Pacific must have been an arduous and complex affair. BY TYLER ROGOWAY Dec 12 2021
The badly damaged Seawolf class nuclear fast-attack submarine USS Connecticut (SSN-22) has just appeared in San Diego after making a covert transit from Guam, all but certainly sailing the entire way on the surface. It had been staged on that island for around two months following its collision with an underwater seamount in the South China Sea on October 2nd, 2021. Thanks to our friends at @Warshipcam who spotted and identified the submarine entering San Diego Bay on the local San Diego Webcam, we also get a far clearer look at the damage done to the prized submarine—its entire bow sonar dome is indeed missing.
We have more or less known that Connecticut had left Guam for many days now as the sub had not appeared in satellite imagery at its previous berth in Guam. We reached out to the Navy for information as to its whereabouts, but we did not receive a response, which further pointed to it being on a secretive surface transit across the Pacific.
We had thought Connecticut’s most likely destination would have been its home in Bremerton, Washington. That is where the three Seawolf class submarines are based. Navy statements also supported that assumption. But now we know San Diego was where it was headed, at least first. Washington state is 5,600 miles from Guam direct. San Diego is farther at 6,200 miles, but the course to San Diego takes it close to islands where it could abort its voyage to safely, namely Hawaii. One of the Navy’s master submarine bases is in San Diego at Point Loma. It’s possible, if not probable, that it could still travel to Washington after this stop.
The reason it didn’t stay in Guam is that there is no drydock there to make any sort of significant repairs to the vessel. Pearl Harbor is the closest location with such capabilities, but considering there are only three boats in the Seawolf class, it may have been a challenge for it to take on such a unique repair job. Its drydock facilities are also extremely heavily tasked and are a strategic asset in the Pacific that would have had their capacity decreased, possibly for years, if Connecticut called on it to repair its damage.
A 6,200 mile surface transit in a submarine that is damaged and doesn’t even have a bow sonar dome must have been extremely unpleasant. We also don’t know what sort of escorts Connecticut must have had for her trans-Pacific transit. We have reached out to the Navy for comment and will update this post as soon as we hear back.
UPDATE:
This is all the Navy was willing to convey to us in response to our questions about Connecticut’s journey:
USS Connecticut (SSN 22) is in port in San Diego. The submarine remains in a safe and stable condition.
Thank you, Cindy
CDR Cindy Fields Force Public Affairs Officer Commander, Submarine Force U.S. Pacific Fleet
It’s also worth mentioning that the destroyer USS Mustin arrived in San Diego not long after USS Connecticut. It’s possible that she provided security for the stricken submarine on at least part of its voyage.
Mustin left San Diego on November 26th and was in Pearl Harbor on December 1st, so the dates seem to line up. Still, U.S. warships can make this transit for a number of reasons.
NYT Breaking News: Except for the whistle blower who sent to jail for 14 month exposing the crimes against humanity. No U.S. troops will be punished for the botched strike in Afghanistan that killed 10 civilians, including children, a Pentagon official said.
As Canada is a member of the once secret 5-eyes intelligence alliance (US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) it needs to create certain media spectacles to attack their “enemies”. Listen to the PM declare a boycott of the Beijing games “over human rights” while his gov’t continues its genocide on our First Nations.
We used to brought up using our parents, our grandfather, our teachers and our leaders as role models!
For our future generations continue to lives in the “Western Foster Homes” countries brought up hearing lies from the leaders and news medias everyday as a way of lives. We really cannot blame majority of children turned out morally sick. 種瓜得瓜 種豆得豆 like my father taught us.
Look at Canada Prime Minister talk about boycotting Beijing Olympic, really disgusting and shameless.
The roles played by Australia, Sweden and Britain under pressure from America to persecute the founder of WikiLeaks is well-known. However, Ecuador and its domestic politics in the past decade may be even more relevant, but little understood.
Throughout the second half of 2019, riots and protests gripped the city, leading to increasingly intense and violent confrontations with police. Many businesses throughout the city were hurt. Myriad social, political and economic problems long simmering under the surface burst forth, all causing intense dissatisfaction with the government, even hatred against it. At times, the city was paralysed.
Oh, you thought I was talking about Hong Kong? Actually no; the following would have given the game away. At least six protesters were killed and hundreds injured, according to official estimates. A state of emergency, or what the government of Ecuador called “a state of exception”, was eventually declared in the capital, Quito, allowing the military to exercise total control and discretion. Lenin Moreno, who was president at the time, fled the city.
Back in Hong Kong, no rioter or protester was killed. No state of emergency or martial law was ever declared. No People’s Liberation Army personnel were ever involved, except in cleaning up debris after a particularly nasty typhoon.
But Western media and governments, especially US media and Washington, went into a hysterical feeding frenzy over Hong Kong that continues to this day. Meanwhile, Washington was practically silent about the troubles in Ecuador, which became friendly with the United States once again after a period of hostility under Moreno’s predecessor and former mentor, the leftist Rafael Vicente Correa, most famous to many foreigners for providing sanctuary to Julian Assange at the Ecuadorean embassy in London and granting him citizenship.
In the case of Assange and how Washington managed to trap the world’s greatest citizen-journalist by bending not one, not two but four supposedly democratic governments to its will, the domestic politics of Ecuador in the past decade is perhaps the least understood but also the most relevant.
In our part of the world, it’s well-known how the Australian government (both Labor and Liberal), beginning with former prime minister Julia Gillard and then with Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, has washed its hands of the country’s world-famous citizen; and how the media empire controlled by Rupert Murdoch has routinely conducted minimal reporting, if at all, instead of expressing its brand of speciality outrage.
The kangaroo courts of London went into action as soon as the Ecuadorean embassy released Assange into the custody of British police in 2019. And, throughout the past decade, the prosecutorial office of Sweden kept resurrecting sexual assault charges and extradition requests against Assange, whose lawyers had warned once he was sent to Sweden, US authorities would immediately request extradition on sealed or undisclosed charges. Sure enough, once he was handed to British authorities, US prosecutors immediately unsealed the espionage charges based on a set of obscure and rarely used American laws dating back to the first world war with a maximum jail term of 175 years. Swedish prosecutors immediately “reopened” and then dropped the case once and for all. Interestingly, the alleged key victim in the case had declared, for a long time, that she had no interest in pursuing rape charges against Assange.
But the cooperation, both tacit and active, of Australia, Britain and Sweden would have been for nothing without a change of government in Ecuador. Correa was part of a group of leftist leaders in South America led by the late Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who proved to be a thorn in the side of Washington and its allied oligarchic business elites in the region.
When Moreno took over the presidency in 2017, he dismantled many popular measures of his predecessor by launching a neoliberal economic reform.
He lowered taxes, especially for big companies and to attract foreign investors; granted amnesty to some people previously convicted on financial fraud; relaxed labour protection laws, liberalised trade policy, reduced public spending and ended fuel subsidies. He supported oil drilling in the Amazon and allowed the US military to access an airbase on the environmentally sensitive Galapagos Islands, most famous for a historic visit by Charles Darwin that led to his formulation of the theory of evolution.
In other words, he imposed International Monetary Fund-like austerity measures or “conditionalities”, usually hated by the recipient countries, even before the IMF and World Bank were invited to step in with more than US$10 billion in loans. That must have been easy negotiations.
His government did restore some public subsidies, which helped end the protests in October 2019.
Moreno was close to the Americans. As the incoming president, Moreno secretly met Donald Trump’s election campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, in May 2017 to discuss evicting Assange from the Ecuadorean embassy in London. That disclosure came from an investigation by US Special Counsel Robert Mueller looking into links between the Russian government and Trump’s presidential election campaign.
The then US vice-president, Mike Pence, also met Moreno the following year during which they discussed the Assange case and the need to improve bilateral relations.
Thereafter, the Moreno government started complaining publicly about how bad Assange had been as a guest of the embassy, such as disturbing and abusing staff, hacking computers and even having poor personal hygiene. All that was duly swallowed by some mainstream Anglo-American media outlets. Having made the case against him, Assange was duly stripped of his Ecuadorean citizenship and handed over to British police.
Washington, predictably, ignored Moreno’s troubles at home and the popular protests against his regime, while going into overdrive over Hong Kong’s riots, portraying them as a peaceful fight for freedom and democracy.
Assange probably knew his time was up as soon as Moreno was elected president. He was the proverbial sitting duck, or bird in a cage.
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.
On December 13, 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army captured the city of Nanjing and brutally killed approximately 300,000 Chinese civilians and unarmed soldiers over the next six weeks, making it one of the most barbaric episodes of World War II.
The only surviving video documentation of the inhuman massacre discovered to date was shot by John Gillespie Magee, an American missionary who later testified at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.
Editor’s note: The United States has been at war for more than 200 of its 240 years of existence. Between the end of WW II and 9/11 – barely 50 years – the U.S. initiated 201 conflicts that ravaged 153 countries and regions. “America: War by another name” is a special eight-part series that explores the sinister motivations for its warmongering. Episode 1 examines how the pursuit of capital justified multiple genocides.
In the film “Good Will Hunting,” there is a scene when the protagonist Will Hunting is asked why he refused to work for the National Security Agency.
He replied, “Say I’m working at NSA. Somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. So I take a shot at it and maybe I break it… But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and 1,500 people I never had a problem with get killed. Now the politicians are saying, ‘Send in the marines to secure the area’… It won’t be their kid over there, getting shot… It’ll be some kid from Southie taking shrapnel in the as… And the guy who put the shrapnel in his as got his old job, cause he’ll work for 15 cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile, he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And of course the oil companies used the skirmish to scare up oil prices so they could turn a quick buck… So what did I think? I’m holding out for something better.”
What he said was an accurate reflection of the giant web of interests woven by American political and capital powers through wars. It also expressed the frustration keenly felt by decent Americans of conscience over their own country’s waging of wars.
History always repeats itself. Will’s telling analysis of America’s war logic also tells the fate of army officers who did not have the heart to draw their sword against innocent people in the genocide of American Indians.
On November 29, 1864, a 700-man force of the Third Colorado Cavalry under the command of Colonel John Chivington raided an Indian encampment, committing the blood-curdling Sand Creek Massacre. Chivington, once a Methodist pastor but now a butcher, shouted, “Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians.”
Under his instruction, more than 100 American Indians were killed, two-thirds being defenseless women and children. Some victims were even dismembered, with their scalps and body organs treated as trophies by American soldiers. In spite of the ruthlessness, there were still a small number of compassionate officers in the army who refused to kill innocent people. Captain Silas Soule was one of them. His frustration-laden letters back then, now kept in the Denver Library, detailed the tragedy.
One letter written to Major Edward Wynkoop reads:
“The massacre lasted six or eight hours, and a good many Indians escaped. I tell you Ned it was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized. One squaw was wounded, and a fellow took a hatchet to finish her, and he cut one arm off, and held the other with one hand and dashed the hatchet through her brain.”
In another letter to his mother, he wrote:
“The day you wrote, I was present at a Massacre of three hundred Indians mostly women and children. It was a horrible scene, and I would not let my Company fire. They were friendly and some of our soldiers were in their Camp at the time trading… Some of the Indians fought when they saw no chance of escape and killed twelve… of our men. I had one Horse shot… I hope the authorities at Washington will investigate the killing of those Indians. I think they will be apt to hoist some of our high officials. I would not fire on the Indians with my Co. and the Col. said he would have me cashiered, but he is out of the service before me and I think I stand better than he does in regard to his great Indian fight.”
The records and narratives of Soule and other righteous officers who refused to participate in the massacre sparked such outrage that the authorities had to initiate an investigation. Despite Chivington’s coercion and cajolery, Soule resolutely chose to testify about the war crime before the Colorado military commission. Because of this, he was eventually assassinated. The name Silas Soule is not known to many Americans, but as historian David Fridtjof Halaas put it, without people like him who had the courage to disobey orders, “the descendants probably wouldn’t be around today, and there would be no one to tell the stories.”
The Sand Creek Massacre is but one episode of the 100-year U.S. genocide against Native Americans. Rapacious acts including ethnic cleansing, cultural erosion and environment destruction reinforced America’s national strength and paved the way for its rise. The misdeed was seemingly driven by Washington’s land policy to promote westward expansion, but, in its essence, this was the one and only path for the U.S. to complete its primitive accumulation of capital and the transition from free competition to monopoly.
For a long time after the founding of the U.S., an extremely large portion of Congress seats were occupied by land opportunists, land brokers, big capitalists and those who had a close connection with them. In an era where the country had just emerged out of the rubble of war and had to start from scratch, the U.S. government did two things to ease financial difficulties.
For one, taking advantage of Native Americans’ ignorance of modern concepts such as sovereignty, territory, real right and human rights, it implemented an exploitative policy combining massacre, deceptive treaties, loans and forced assimilation to arbitrarily snatch away control over their ancestral homelands.
For another, it traded the “fruits” of war, namely lands, for scarce capital. Big capitalists and land opportunists sold lands to ordinary immigrants at a high price in the form of usurious loans to bankrupt the latter. This indirectly promoted the development of capitalist farms and the land tenancy system. In the meantime, they invested the profits from land opportunism in high-returning sectors such as the fur trade and the transportation industry.
If, in the American Indian Wars, Native Americans were the biggest victims, followed by the ordinary public, then investors including businessmen, bankers, financiers and factory owners, together with social elites and senior politicians, were the ultimate winners in the capital reshuffle.
Until this day, while the feats of America’s founding fathers such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are much celebrated, there has rarely been any mention of the Indian lives that they trod underfoot and slaughtered like lambs.
When people eulogize the pioneering, aspiring and reformative American spirit fostered by the westward movement, they intuitively turn a blind eye to the blood of innocent American Indians flowing underneath capitalist lust and greed.
Captain Silas Soule’s letters and fate unveiled, through the American Indian Wars, an age of roaring capital growth. As a witness of the tragedy of Native Americans, a man of conscience and an army officer serving the government, he wrote a dirge of humanity that is supposed to be dedicated to American Indians.
(The author, Wang Congyue, is an assistant research fellow at the Institute of American Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. If you want to contribute and have specific expertise, please contact us at opinions@cgtn.com.)
Reuter: The curious case of a map and a disappearing Taiwan minister at U.S. democracy summit. Embarrassing map with independent Taiwan causes US to cut video feed. Taiwan is part of China. 路透社：美國民主峰會上地圖和台灣部長失踪的奇怪案例。 台灣獨立的尷尬地圖導緻美國切斷視頻源。 台灣是中國的一部分。
A video feed of a Taiwanese minister was cut during U.S. President Joe Biden’s Summit for Democracy last week after a map in her slide presentation showed Taiwan in a different color to China, which claims the island as its own.
Sources familiar with the matter told Reuters that Friday’s slide show by Taiwanese Digital Minister Audrey Tang caused consternation among U.S. officials after the map appeared in her video feed for about a minute.
The sources, who did not want to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter, said the video feed showing Tang was cut during an ongoing panel discussion and replaced with audio only – at the behest of the White House. The White House was concerned that differentiating Taiwan and China on a map in a U.S.-hosted conference – to which Taiwan had been invited in a show of support at a time when it is under intense pressure from Beijing – could be seen as being at odds with Washington’s “one-China” policy, which avoids taking a position as to whether Taiwan is part of China, the sources said.
