Inside China -- on China's Twitter

Discussion in 'Coronavirus (COVID-19) News' started by Doug1943, Feb 9, 2020.

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  1. Doug1943

    Doug1943 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    We really ought to know a lot more about China than we do. Our general ignorance of the realities of daily life in important countries like China, Russia, and Iran, is a huge weakness. Most people know very little about them, and just have a general picture of life there -- one which probably is close to their idea of life in prison. The reality in all of these countries is vastly different.

    Here's a starter: the "Chinese twitter", Weibo, which is, like everything in China, censored by
    the government, is covered by a site in the West. Here's a report on how the Corona Virus is being reported and talked about on Weibo, which is really interesting:

    https://www.whatsonweibo.com/the-co...ding-topics-in-times-of-the-2019-ncov-crisis/

    A friend of mine speculated about the virus and the government's initial clumsy response to it perhaps being "China's Chernobyl", the Chernobyl event being credited with putting the final nail in the Soviet coffin. I think she's a bit optimistic -- we probably have another one of two generations to go in China before we have an internationally-aware, self-confident, population which demands to be treated as adults. But we'll get there. (Same for Iran, same for Russia.)
     
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  2. scarlet witch

    scarlet witch Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Well it is said the pandemic is being handled similarly to their economy... they run two sets of numbers. Infections and deaths are likely up to 13 times higher than reported.

    I have seen a first hand video yesterday of someone in Wuhan walking around the deserted city, there are food vendors outside, people have at least access to food and shops (unless they are infected and doors literally welded and barricaded shut on buildings so they can't come out).

    After the initial mishandling of the crisis the Chinese government now seem to be handling things a lot better... providing for those in lockdown.
     
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  3. scarlet witch

    scarlet witch Well-Known Member Past Donor

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  4. Doug1943

    Doug1943 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Here's the right link: https://www.whatsonweibo.com/the-co...ding-topics-in-times-of-the-2019-ncov-crisis/
     
  5. Poohbear

    Poohbear Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I consider this assessment to be intelligent and spot on.
    Going further, I wonder what a mid Century liberal China
    will look like? It will be Westernized but will it be Christian
    or still under Confucianism?
     
    Last edited: Feb 9, 2020
  6. Doug1943

    Doug1943 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    My -- utterly speculative -- guess is that it will be a kind of semi-Westernized secular Confucianism -- and I think Confucianism is much closer to being secular already ...
    in other words, it will be like Christianity is becoming in the West ... a cultural inheritance, sitting alongside various pan-spiritualist beliefs... effectively a kind of soft
    agnosticism, more indifference than anything else.

    If we don't destroy ourselves, I would speculate further: I think the world will be much more intermingled ... American kids will be attending college in China to get a good education and working there,
    and the whole world will be a lot more interpenetrated in terms of where people live, whom they marry etc.

    But the wish may be parent to the thought.
     
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  7. Poohbear

    Poohbear Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    There is this possibility that under Xi China could regress. A bit like
    Putin's Russia. Deng's China could vanish over a generation or so.
    What do you think?
     
  8. 61falcon

    61falcon Well-Known Member

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    Personally do not believe the Chinese lie anymore than our own government does.
     
  9. Doug1943

    Doug1943 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I'm reluctant to speculate too much.

    I lived in the Soviet Union for a few months, in 1985. (I accompanied my then-wife there, who was a Fulbright Exchange Scholar; she taught economics in Kharkov for about six months.) I got to give a few lectures on "Microcomputers and Ecucation" in Kharkov, Akademgoroduk, and Tallin -- I had brought my microcomputer with me. We made a number of Russian friends, and went back several times for a month or two each time, over the next five years -- I got to give some lectures on computational linguistics at a couple of Soviet universities.

    And so I thought I knew something about the Russian people.

    When Gorbachev -- praised be his name! -- pulled the plug on the whole system, I was very optimistic. I thought we would have liberal democracy from Stockholm to Vladivostok.

    My then wife even moved to Moscow in the 90s for a year, and edited the Economic and Social Newsletter. In addition to the friends we had made -- some of whom came to the UK and stayed for various periods of time with us, after they were allowed to travel -- she got to know a number of important players in the new democratic political groups.

    So I was quite optimistic about the future of democracy there -- and therefore in the world.

    Wrong, wrong, wrong.

    In 2005, after the successful election in Iraq, my initial skepticism about the wisdom of invading the place faded a lot. I thought it was possible that they were on the road to a stable democracy.

    Wrong, wrong, wrong.

    So I don't like to make predictions.

    But here is my prediction: they won't regress. They will, like Iran, continue to educate their upcoming generations, who will be increasingly integrated, intellectually, with the world, increasingly self-confident, and eventually will not put up with being treated like naughty children who must be closely supervised all the time. How this will play out, I don't know. I don't think there will be a great upheaval. I predict a peaceful evolution.

    Of course, we could have a huge war and then all bets are off.

    And what are your thoughts?
     
  10. Poohbear

    Poohbear Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    History repeats, only it doesn't. We have never seen anything like the surveillance they have in China now.
    Sure, seeing digital photos smuggled out of China (ie the Muslim treatment) is interesting, but I don't know
    what a revolution would look like under such an Orwellian system.
    For a while such a system can be used against the state - but not for long.
    But it's hard to keep people down when they are rich and "educated." I wonder how long the Russian govt
    can keep its population down - for sure they will firewall the internet and follow China's example in all areas
    of social control.
    The problem is, as they say, is that liberal democracies don't formulate long term strategic ideas, China and
    Russia have done just that.
    But for predictions - they work but not for the future. Who would have thought the Berlin Wall would come
    down? Who predicted Deng (well... maybe Mao) Who predicted Putin and Xi? Who predicted America being
    an exporter of oil? Who predicted no-one soon will want oil? Who predicated SpaceX and Tesla?
     
  11. Doug1943

    Doug1943 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I agree absolutely about the unpredictability of the future. I read a lot of science fiction back in the 50s and 60s: here were some bright, imaginative people, trying to predict the future -- none of them even predicted the internet! (Well, one half-way did. Robert Heinlein, in of his late pot-boilers, had a version of the ARPA-net as used by academics in the early 80s. But if anyone predicted the Web, I never saw it. Much less the enormous social changes -- homosexual Presidential candidates, a stock-market in Moscow, etc.

    And the desirability, despite that, of having a Grand Strategy, on the part of the US -- but I think the chances of that have passed, and we have
    to have much more modest aims in the US today: namely, shaking off the chains of empire, encouraging our allies to take over much more of the burden of defending themselves, preparing for the next big war, and trying to work out a way for Red and Blue America to go their separate ways peacefully and stop tormenting each other.

    On anothr point: most dictatorships and authoritarian regimes are not overthrown via a violent revolution. Rather, they have splits within the ruling elite, and they evolve.

    We tend not to remember this now, but there were many anti-Communist dictatorships and authoritarian regimes which the US supported -- enemy of my enemy and all that. Among them:
    Spain, Greece, Turkey, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, and a host of other Latin American ones. I won't mention African examples, or Asian ones, but they would add to the list.

    Almost none of them fell to mass upheavals, even fewer to bloody revolutions, but they did 'fall' to a change in mass sentiment, including the sentiment of at least some of their elite. They didn't become model liberal democracies, but even model liberal democracies look like committing suicide, so more change is on the way.

    The US put pressure on some of them to change, to its credit. We can't say that even imperfect European-style liberal democracy is well-established and invulnerable in these countries today ... but neither can we say that about the United States or Europe.
     
    Last edited: Feb 10, 2020

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