Posted on 03/22/2018 10:52:54 PM PDT by drop 50 and fire for effect
As a foreigner in China, you get used to hearing the retort “You don’t know China!” spat at you by locals. It’s usually a knee-jerk reaction to some uncomfortable modern issue or in defense of one of the many historical myths children in the mainland are taught as unshakeable facts about the world. But it’s also true. We don’t know China. Nor, however, do the Chinese — not even the government.
We don’t know China because, in ways that have generally not been acknowledged, virtually every piece of information issued from or about the country is unreliable, partial, or distorted. The sheer scale of the country, mixed with a regime of ever-growing censorship and a pervasive paranoia about sharing information, has crippled our ability to know China. Official data is repeatedly smoothed for both propaganda purposes and individual career ambitions. That goes as much for Chinese as it does for foreigners; access may sometimes be easier for Chinese citizens, but the costs of going after information can be even higher.
We don’t know the real figures for GDP growth, for example. GDP growth has long been one of the main criteria used to judge officials’ careers — as a result, the relevant data is warped at every level, since the folk reporting it are the same ones benefitting from it being high. If you add up the GDP figures issued by the provinces, the sum is 10 percent higher than the figure ultimately issued by the national government, which in itself is tweaked to hit politicized targets. Provincial governments have increasingly admitted to this in recent years, but the fakery has been going on for decades. We don’t know the extent of bad loans, routinely concealed by banks. We don’t know the makeup of most Chinese financial assets.
(Excerpt) Read more at foreignpolicy.com ...
None of the information, not one single byte of data used to discuss China is accurate, and probably not even in the ballpark. China is a closed society both due to Party policy and an environment that actively discourages honest data collection. My gut tells me that General Secretary Xi is playing a much weaker economic and military hand than he realizes.
Confident societies are not afraid of freedom.
Confident societies are not afraid of God and Christians.
The Party elite and top government officials get uncensored and candid reports average Chinese are not allowed to see.
They have a good idea of the true state of the country and so far there’s no reason for them to change.
The Soviet elite where forced to change because things were so bad change was both necessary and inevitable. Things in China are not yet at a state where democracy is a consideration.
As long as things are well in hand, the status quo will continue. And people seldom change unless its in their interest and even then change is frightening to them.
That’s the only thing every one knows for certain about China - including the Chinese government.
China is a developing developed country.
Confronting China has never been a bright idea.
I posted to the english version of People’s Daily about democracy.
Not that I’m expecting it to happen in my lifetime but at least there’s hope they will take seriously at some point.
A soft landing would be better for China in the long run than a hard crash.
There’s the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle - Nothing will ever be known with ultimate precision.
That applies in general to our state of knowledge.
China is actively targeting ex-patriot American pilots and aircrews; reacting to Trump, I expect. My son has left.
Even Mao said he'd only managed to change things around Beijing to some degree for a while.
The culture is incredible. And the cultural inertia--even after the cultural revolution--is also incredible.
The smug arrogance about being the middle/central Kingdom ... with the paragon specimens of the human critter is probably at least 3 standard deviations from the mean. The Japanese are similar in that regard.
What’uh you know....?
/S
LOL
The article was a rip of Rumsfields theory ...
They are all about appearances for appearances sake...
Or Sake’
There is that, for sure. Particularly at Xin Nian Quai Le—Chinese New Year.
Confident societies are not afraid of freedom.
Confident societies are not afraid of God and Christians.
Are we talking about China or America?
Chinese are proud of their history and culture.
And one out of every four human beings on earth is Chinese.
Yes, they are inward-looking and change doesn’t come naturally to them but they do see themselves as superior to the barbarians.
And they don’t care to be lectured by us about their deficencies.
We Americans have been on the brink of disaster many a time..the struggle continues and never ends. Freedom is a living, breathing FIGHT.
But enough people chose Trump.
The Chinese and Russians chose the “stability” of authoritarian darkness as Putin is set to rule longer than Stalin with an updated Soviet throwback agenda, and Xi Jinping is set to rule for life with an updated Maoist agenda.
As much s**t gets thrown at Rumsfeld, this was an incredible statement that was more true than any of his detractors could possibly understand. Because they did not know what they did not know, and did not care.
He was also completely honest and correct about not going to war with the army you want, but the army you have. Nobody in history has ever went to war with the army they thought they wanted.
People take the devil they know over uncertainty.
Given the history of chaos in Russia and China, that’s completely understandable.
Our Western concept of freedom appeals to very few people and history is proof of it.
We’re not living at the end of history and the triumph of liberal values remains far from assured.
For sure. Though they will spend many hours arguing with each other over every conceivable nuance and possible meaning of every word in the latest speech from the elite in Beijing.
“Why should cattle have the gifts of freedom? Their heritage from generation to generation is the belled yoke and the lash.” - Aleksandr Pushkin
“Now the LORD is the Spirit. And where the Spirit of the LORD is, there is freedom.” - Saint Paul
This is one of the most ridiculous stories I’ve read in a long time. In many ways, I think China is a lot less strict than Korea in terms of controlling its citizens. That being said, I feel a lot more comfortable in Korea because I know people will behave even when the government isn’t looking and the vast majority are law-abiding and honest (Korea, like Japan, has almost no crime as compared to the U.S., and you will get comments in both countries about how America is dangerous and violent). In China, in a lot of ways it is totally chaotic in terms of social behavior from being chaos on the roads to chaos in terms of crowd behavior to there being a fairly high risk of dishonest behavior (especially getting cheated or being a victim of some scam).
And millions of Mainland Chinese travel as tourists throughout Asia, although that travel has been cut back recently due to increased tensions over things like THAAD. Chinese citizens are well aware of what is going on in the rest of the world. Sure they view everything from a slanted “Our China” perspective. But we do the exact same thing in the U.S., viewing Asia from our perspective which is often wildly inaccurate.
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