Broken China all over the floor

 

How do we solve a problem like China! Does a problem like China actually exist? Can a problem like China be solved? Is China a problem at all? 

This wittering is not about the Chinese people and their desire to eat exotic animals in wet markets. It's hardly as though they are the only nation in the world that do so. Actually it is probably normal behaviour in the east. 

Any fuss about what the Chinese eat, or how, or when, or why is more to do with western sensitivities that have come about over the last few decades, after all I still recollect my mum telling me about how her mum would step outside, pick up a chicken from the yard and snap it's neck with a sharp expert twist in preparation for the Sunday dinner! It's just we have become inured against such things. As a society we pop into a supermarket and pickup a sanitised plastic packed pale, generally blood free, pack of one meat or another and try not to think about the process of where it was just five days earlier and how it got to the plastic package now in our collective hands. 

But that's nothing to do with what I was talking about, I'm just rambling at a tangent!

I mean, China under Xi is going to become a much bigger issue than most people perceive and it is only a matter of time before the Chinese government do something that is completely unacceptable to another government such that they push back!

It could be a trigger on any of a number of fronts. The PLA are continually pushing boundaries to see how far they can get away with their actions. Whether it is killing Indian soldiers in hand to hand combat on a disputed land border between the two countries and backing up the attacks with orchestrated and co-ordinated social media attacks to blame the Indian army on breaking agreements but also having a large heavily armed military base just kilometres away in case the Indian government wants to make something of it, like a playground bully might do. 

Or perhaps it will be maritime sovereignty declarations around what once were small rocky outcrops in the South China Sea that shipping has for centuries tried desperately to avoid for fear of running aground but today for fear of being attacked by the inhabitants of these, now are far larger, islands, reclaimed from the sea and now bristling with large military installations that are reminiscent of sea forts similar to those built by the British during the Napoleonic wars!

More likely it will be a miscalculation, or perhaps a deliberate miscalculation, in the on-going dispute in regard of the status of Taiwan. The number of incursion flights by military aircraft and naval incursions also have increased presumably to keep the dispute in the forefront of the new US administrations mind and also to remind everybody, including the Taiwanese themselves, that China regards Taiwan as part of China and one day it will come back into the fold, one way or another. 

Previous Chinese leaderships have been less concerned about Taiwan and less keen to start a fight which nobody will win. Xi is different and far more likely to do so at a time of his choosing.

Who knows, maybe it'll be Taiwan attacking China as we should not forget Taiwan is actually the Republic of China and believes it is China and the mainland, The Peoples Republic of China, belongs to it and not the illegitimate regime in Beijing, but that's another story!

And, it seems almost every day the Chinese government take actions that the rest of the world should be incensed by. Not least of which is the actions that the rest of the world are slowly but surely accepting as genocidal towards the Uighurs in Xinjiang. To call the massive structures that have been built as education centres to aid the Uighurs education is laughable. Or to defend the actions as necessary to prevent terrorism is also a joke.

These centres are, at best, re-education centres designed to destroy the culture of the Uighurs and indoctrinate them into the Han Chinese system. The mistaken belief of the Chinese state is that the graduates of these re-education universities will come out brainwashed and reprogrammed, they will have no religion and their first language will be Han Chinese and they will have complete loyalty to the PRC and a belief that big brother Xi is supreme in all matters.

That would be bad enough but the treatment of the human beings inside these concentration camps, with barbed wire atop 5 metre high walls with guard posts looking inwards rather than looking out is a travesty and something the west said would never happen again after British, American and Russian soldiers first entered German concentration camps at the end of the second world war. I add Russian soldiers as they too were shocked at what they found but to be honest they did not need to look westwards to find such camps as there were plenty of similar camps in Stalin's Russia and a wrong word at the wrong time found a soldier visiting his own private hell via the NKVD. That said, surviving was a win for the average Russian soldier during WWII! 

But back to Chinese concentration camps. The Chinese, and I mean the communist party not the average people, believe these camps can break those that are deemed to require retraining and make them model citizens. 

Quite how they achieve that by treating people in such inhumane ways, including systematic gang rape and torture, is unclear. Most others, including the British, have found that such methods do not work. the Germans under fascism differed only slightly, they believed that there was only one pure race and that all other races were subservient and useful only as slaves towards the superior race. 

The Chinese dictatorship is not so far removed from this with the determination that Han Chinese are the supreme Chinese and all others are subservient but can become model citizens if they comply with the rules of the Chinese Communist Party. That should probably be a worry to the other 54 ethnic minorities in China.

The worst thing about this is that nobody is taking any serious steps to address these atrocities carried out by the PRC/PLA. In fact, we are all complicit in their actions by buying Chinese goods simply because they are cheaper and for the most part, well made! 

But the impact of putting human rights to one side at the expense of having to pay more for mass produced made in China goods is that we pay for the camps that are being built, we pay for the increased military spending, we pay for the creation of man made islands in the South China Sea.

And at the same time as we pay for the Chinese state to undertake all these actions and to grow ever more powerful we also forget to ask how the Chinese could possibly produce all these goods at such low prices in the first place. Not to mention asking ourselves why do we need so much mass produced, soon to be landfill, product!

It would be far better, to my mind at least, to pivot away from China, to put human life above cheap goods and to purchase the things we need from countries with greater need of money, with functioning democracies and with human rights records that are at least better than those of China. If India could get it's act together it could easily be a better option but it tries and fails time and time again.

Buying less but better quality should be a direction we travel in anyway for other reasons but we won't because we have so much temptation placed in our paths, after all, despite everything I write I can still point to a dozen items I have from Primark myself!

At the same time, what about the Chinese people? They may well have their own thoughts, but in general that is frowned upon. Far better to just comply and by comply I mean believe everything the state media puts out which would include statements that education centres in Xinjian are designed to improve the lives of poor rural peasants and to prevent terrorism attacks! Or stories, started by the state media, that Covid did not start in Wuhan but was brought into the country by a visitor from its true originating point in Italy, or the USA, depending upon the day! 

Of course if the story about earlier cases being found in Italy before any death in Wuhan are actually found to be true then I guess I'll have to rewrite this and bid a grovelling apology. I just have a few teensy weensy questions, primary amongst them would be, why was there not an epicentre of death emanating from this unspecified area of Italy. But heh, lets see what history tells us.

The chances of anybody getting to the truth of how Covid-19 made the leap from animal to human is highly unlikely. So unlikely that this was not even the stated reason for the WHO delegation being in China recently. As for the frozen fish hypothesis... 

The chances of another peoples uprising like Tiananmen is highly unlikely or even impossible. Mainly because of social media and the vice like grip the Chinese state has on all social media within China. Anybody that thinks they are above the state in China will quickly be disavowed of any such notion, just ask Jack Ma! And Jack Ma is only one of a long list of entrepreneurs that have crossed a line with the Chinese state and been politely requested to either step back or... go straight to jail, and/or lose every dollar they have ever earned in the process. 

That's only one reason why governments around the world are moving away from Chinese produced highly sensitive infrastructure. Or at least they should be.