China, Unquarantined

COVID-19 shows the dangers that the Western world ignored when it embraced the CCP imperial dynasty

The COVID-19 pandemic is the single greatest global peacetime catastrophe that humanity has suffered since the end of the Second World War. Barely months into what promises to be a multiyear disaster, the pandemic has already cost America alone over 100,000 lives, tens of millions of jobs, and trillions of dollars in lost output, income, and wealth. The ultimate toll for the world as a whole from this pandemic — both the direct and the indirect consequences — may still lie beyond imagining.

How did such a terrible calamity befall humanity? This grave question is not only an epidemiological puzzle. It is also a political one.

As is increasingly understood in the United States and abroad, the Chinese government and its agents bear a terrible and immediate responsibility for conduct that turned a localized contagion into a global pandemic. But the COVID-19 disaster could not have devastated America and the world as it is now doing if China were still an impoverished, isolated Maoist outpost, with scant global contact, involvement, or influence. The world is suffering a planetary plague because China today is deeply integrated into the world economy, and into the institutions of global governance as well — even though it is ruled by a dictatorship whose values, priorities, and objectives are fundamentally incompatible with those of the liberal international order.

It was not by accident or happenstance that China became a major player in the world economy and, more broadly, in the liberal international order that the United States was instrumental in fashioning. That outcome, rather, is largely a result of concerted American policy....

If you took the time to read this long article re China, then I would encourage you to copy/paste the following in your browser “search” and read this article for another viewpoint on Chinese intentions.

“The Secret Speech of General Chi Haotian”

made about twenty years ago, first published in 2005.

China isn’t in thrall to any modern “isms”. It is basically the heir to a several thousand-year tradition of absolutist rule. That wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t also a state whose rulers have traditionally claimed the right to govern “all under heaven” - expanding the nation’s territory and the peoples brought into the empire on an opportunistic basis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianxia

[China’s great civilization has a long and storied heritage. But it also has an extraordinarily long political tradition of despotic imperial rule, which is in the main a saga of exquisitely perfecting mass tyranny, even when antique premodern technologies were the only instruments available for enforcing such repression. (Though born over 2,000 years before Lenin, Qin Shi Huangdi, the first emperor of a unified Chinese state, might still have taught Vladimir Ilyich a thing or two about the administration of terror and the concentration of unchallenged absolutist state power.)

Thus, trashing Marxism, and the people’s communes, and much of the previous Soviet-style central-planning system as well — as the CCP has done in recent decades — does not in fact set Chinese autocracy adrift. Hardly. The CCP has deep historical muscle memory to draw on as it develops its own updated rendition of “autocracy with Chinese characteristics,” one that harnesses market mechanisms and highly sophisticated networks to strengthen the foundations of the regime — and extend its thrall.]

Culture is stronger than religion or political philosophy.

In both China and Russia new rulers did not undo their country’s respective ancient political philosophy has much as they merely put it into service for themselves.

The Soviet Czars mostly perpetuated and confiscated the old imperial system for themselves, more so than junking it. After the interregnum of Yeltsin, the Soviet Czars have merely been succeeded by Putin’s mobocracy. Nearly same at the top no matter how different thinks appear down the line.

Mao did not get rid of the centrality of the emperor, he took the emperor’s seat at “the center”. Now a committee functions as the collective emperor.

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