I mean the Jews, for it is from the formerly very Jewish - but now more secular - Tablet Magazine our story comes.
China? Ditto for the five millennia history, India too while we're at it.*
May 17, 2020
The Chinese Communist Party leadership believe they are in the midst of an ‘intense, ideological struggle’ for survival and that to win they must defeat the West
The People's Republic of China now commands the world's largest population, its second-largest economy, and a military-industrial complex and high technology sector second only to America's. Behind this great mass of men and material stands Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China. Xi, supported by the class of Chinese communists who rule along with him, believe it is their role to guide China—and the rest of the world—into a new age. China's military expansion, massive economic investment in controlling global trade routes, and escalating information operations all point to a struggle for dominance that puts it in direct conflict with the West.
In their internal speeches and planning documents, China's communist party leaders describe their perceptions of this struggle quite openly: As Beijing sees it, China’s success depends on discrediting the tenets of liberal capitalism so that notions like individual freedom and constitutional democracy come to be seen as the relics of an obsolete system. To understand how China’s leaders intend to accomplish this and fully appreciate their designs for the future, we must first come to terms with how they understand themselves.
“The very purpose of the [Chinese Communist] Party in leading the people in revolution and development,” Xi Jinping explained to an audience of party cadres in 2012, “is to make the people prosperous, the country strong, and rejuvenate the Chinese nation.” This “rejuvenation” of the Chinese people, which might also be translated as their “revival” or “restoration,” reflects a specific understanding of Chinese history and China’s proper place in world affairs. Chinese of all political persuasions are acutely aware that China was once the standard setter in advanced civilization, the center point around which the economies and cultures of much of the Earth revolved. For many Chinese nationalists, the last two centuries have been a painful aberration from this natural order. The party labels the years that China was exploited by imperialists and divided by warlords “the century of humiliation,” a century that ended only when they took control. The century that followed—which comes to its end 29 years from now, in 2049—is different. This will be the century that makes China great again.
“The rejuvenation of the Chinese people” has been officially endorsed as the “historical mission” of the Communist Party since 1987 but it is an old dream whose origins predate the party’s founding. In the early 20th century Chinese intellectuals searched for a way to “save China,” modernize it, and restore it to the preeminence that the world’s largest civilization deserved. What made the later communists different from other Chinese modernizers was the solution they endorsed. As their sloganeering went: “Only socialism can save China.” The slogan is still in use, though Xi and other 21st-century Communists add a second clause: “Only socialism can save China, and only socialism can develop China.”
Listening to Chinese communists champion their socialist bona fides in one of China’s money-hungry metropoles summons a special sort of cognitive dissonance; distant electric billboards gleam through industrial smog while your conversation partner parrots Marxist cant. But this dissonance cannot be too different from, say, what an outsider might have felt listening to Franklin Delano Roosevelt address a Jefferson-Jackson dinner in 1936. If Jefferson’s writings are your scripture, Roosevelt’s titanic interventions in American life are heresy. Yet Roosevelt thought of himself as the heir to Jefferson and Jackson. He earnestly believed that his program was an adaptation of Jeffersonian ideals and principles to a 20th-century political economy. Roosevelt’s politics were a natural—albeit historically contingent—evolution of America’s liberal tradition, so the politics of the Chinese communists are an outgrowth of their Leninist identity.
One of the most salient continuities between classical Leninism and the current version of communist politics endorsed by Beijing, which the Chinese uncreatively have labeled “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” is the conviction that true modernization must be led by a “vanguard” party that is able to act in the interests of the “overwhelming majority” of people. According to this Leninist line, free markets and free elections lead to the rule of selfish elites, and China’s rejuvenation depends on being protected from both. Despite the concessions made to market-price mechanisms that have helped drive China’s recent economic boom, Chinese communists believe that they lead an ideological-political system distinct from and in opposition to those of the capitalist world.
Circumstance forces temporary cooperation with the self-interested capitalists, but these two systems cannot be permanently reconciled. This was the message Xi delivered to party cadres in one of his first speeches as general secretary of the party in 2013, when he declared his faith in the “historical materialist view that capitalism is bound to die out and socialism is bound to win.” However, as “the ultimate victory of socialism over capitalism” may take several lifetimes to achieve, China’s communists should focus their efforts on a more modest goal:[We must now] broaden our comprehensive national power, improve the lives of our people, build a socialism that is superior to capitalism, and lay the foundation for a future where we will win the initiative and have the dominant position.
As proud self-declared Marxists, the Beijing leadership has carefully studied the failures of past attempts to “construct a socialism superior to capitalism.” From the failings of the Maoist era, the Chinese communists learned that economic and technological modernization cannot happen in a vacuum. In many Chinese minds the People’s Republic of China’s technological stagnation under Mao blends together with the Qing dynasty’s unfortunate discovery that scientific advances in the West had left their military obsolete. The lesson in both cases is the same: If China is to grow strong, it must be integrated with the world outside it.....MUCH MORE
But there are dangers to “opening up” to the outer world. This is the lesson Chinese communists draw from extensive study of the Soviet failure. The party’s official explanation for the collapse of the Soviet Union—which has been communicated to party cadres through speeches, party school education, and even a full-length documentary—is that its demise had nothing to do with the weaknesses of its planned economy or the tensions inherent in a multinational empire masquerading as a people’s republic. In the telling of the Chinese Communist Party, the Soviet Union began to die the day Nikita Khrushchev denounced the cult of personality surrounding Joseph Stalin.....
I've mentioned trying to make some money off President Xi's cult of personality:
February 2019
China’s most popular app is a propaganda tool teaching Xi Jinping Thought"
Of course it is.
Back in August, when posting "China to require patriotism education for intellectuals " (and the rise of "Xi thought") I asked my favorite Chinese translator if there was a way to make money off this.
He said he was sure there was and he'd talk to his wife who has some first rate Beijing connections.
I didn't think any more about the idea until a couple weeks later with "The Little Red Book vs. the Big White Book (Mao v. Xi)" I asked again what his thinking was and he responded that the fam wasn't sure there would be a market for Xi Thought.
Then in November while posting "In Xi We Trust: Inwardly Directed Chinese Propaganda (now with more elephants)" I asked again about maybe making a bucko or two off Xi Thought.
It was then that my interlocutor told me about the time his wife talked him out of buying a pretty nice chunk of Hainan island, which over the last couple decades has been developing nicely and is now poised to take on Shenzhen as a tech hotspot* and I asked "What the Hell? "Why didn't you tell me this earlier?"
And he said that out of a desire for marital harmony he didn't mention it any more, especially after Hainan Airways started running direct flights from Beijing to San Jose International a few years ago....* July 2007
EU Emission Caps, Kyoto and Three Ancient Civilizations
....There is no perfect answer but Kyoto wasn't even close.
The Europeans thought they were gaming the "Cap" by backdating the start date.
The Americans thought they were gaming the treaty by insisting on "Trade".
The Indians and Chinese said "Sure, send us the money".
The Westerners thought they would out-negotiate people who've been negotiating for 5000 years.
As a side note, in December 1979, as silver was making its historic run, an old Jewish trader told me he was lightening up on Ag.If interested see also:
When I asked why he said "I hear the Indian ladies are taking their bracelets off and they've been trading it longer than I have".
"Natural Resources & Sleeper Cells: China’s Plan For The Next 5,000 Years"
