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FTR #1194 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: With virulent anti-Chinese ideology driving American foreign, domestic and nati0nal security policy, we begin a long series of programs setting forth the history of China during the last couple of centuries.
The anti-China pathology gripping the U.S. was concisely expressed in a New York Times article a couple of years ago. The Steve Bannon-led anti-China effort has now become U.S. doctrine: ” . . . . Fear of China has spread across the government, from the White House to Congress to federal agencies, where Beijing’s rise is unquestioningly viewed as an economic and national security threat and the defining challenge of the 21st century. . . .”
A viable understanding of China’s past yields understanding of its present.
Awareness of key dynamics of Chinese history–the Opium Wars in particular–includes:
- The decisive role of European and American military domination and economic exploitation of China.
- The role of the narcotics traffic in the erosion of Chinese society in the 19th century.
- The British-led “Opium Wars,” which were the foundation of the destruction wrought by dope addiction in China.
- The Opium Wars and their implementation by “Gunboat Diplomacy” of British and European territorial expansion in China.
- The pivotal role of that “Gunboat Diplomacy” in the British acquisition of Hong Kong.
- Contemporary Chinese concern with the military safety of their ports, territorial waters, adjacent seas and oceans, shipping lanes, merchant marine traffic. This stems in large measure from China’s experience with “Gunboat Diplomacy” and the ravaging of China by Imperial Japan during the 1930’s and 1940’s.
- The introduction of Western missionaries into China–American missionaries, in particular.
- The fostering of the “Missionary position” toward China on the part of the U.S.
- American missionaries’ use of morphine to cure Chinese opium addicts, a practice so prevalent that the Chinese referred to morphine as “Jesus opium.”
- The importing of Chinese laborers to the U.S., and the resultant, deadly anti-Chinese reaction by White America.
- The enormous opium trade in China as the foundation for the coalescence and ascent of Shanghai’s Green Gang and Tu Yueh-Shen: “Big Eared Tu.”
- The dominance of the Kuomintang of Chiang Kai-Shek by the Green Gang and Big-Eared Tu.
- The fundamental reliance of Chiang’s government on the narcotics trade.
- The dominant role of Chiang Kai-Shek’s regime in the U.S. narcotics trade.
- The doctrinaire fascism of Chiang Kai-Shek and his operational relationships with Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy and Imperial Japan.
- The central role of the Soong family in Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang; T.V. Soong, his sisters Mae-ling (married to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek), Ai-ling (married to H.H. Kung, a key finance minister of the Kuomointang), and several of T. V.‘s brothers, who also shared in the slicing of the pie under Chiang.
- The pivotal role of American publishing giant Henry Luce, whose missionary background in China informed and animated his adoration of Chiang Kai-Shek and Mme. Chiang.
- The role of the Luce publishing empire and the enormous financial influence of the consummately corrupt Soong family in spawning “The China Lobby.”
- The decisive role of the Chiang Kai-Shek’s refusal to fight the Japanese invaders, combined with the brutal repression and civic ineptitude in driving the Chinese people into the arms of Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese Communist Party.
NB: More detailed discussion of the Opium Wars is presented in the two programs following this one.
The program sets forth anti-Chinese racism past and present.
Peter Thiel–lynchpin of power in the Trump administration, the top dog in Palantir (the alpha predator of the electronic surveillance milieu), a key player in Facebook–has disseminated anti-Chinese vitriol about the “yellow peril” in Silicon Valley.
He has been joined in that effort by Steve Bannon, a coordinator of anti-China activity in Washington D.C.
” . . . . The billionaire investor Peter Thiel has accused Google of “treason” and called for a law enforcement investigation of the search engine’s parent company. He speculated that the Chinese government has invaded its employee ranks. A German immigrant via South Africa, Thiel is not alone; his remarks echo the repeated assertions of the rabble rouser Steve Bannon that there are too many Asian CEOs in Silicon Valley. These claims, combined with similar charges of wrongdoing against students and professors of Chinese origin on campuses across the country, are as ominous as they are lurid. While Thiel presents no evidence, Bannon displays ample prejudice. They are inspiring paranoia about everyone of Chinese heritage. . . .”
Among the outgrowths of the Opium Wars was an end to the Qing dynasty’s ban on Chinese emigration and the resultant “coolie trade.”
The Chinese have a long-standing and deserved reputation as good workers. The U.S. and British embrace of the “coolie trade” permitted large numbers of Chinese laborers to be imported into the U.S., where they were widely employed in the silver mining industry and the railroads.
This led to widespread, deadly retaliation by the white establishment against Chinese workers, encouraged by the media and political establishments.
Beheadings, scalping, castration and cannibalism were among the deadly outgrowths of the White Terror against Chinese.
The violence was accompanied by legal restrictions on the immigration by Chinese into the U.S.
The program concludes with review of the death threats and intimidation that the authors of Gold Warriors received over the publication of this and other books.
” . . . .When we published The Soong Dynasty we were warned by a senior CIA official that a hit team was being assembled in Taiwan to come murder us. He said, ‘I would take this very seriously, if I were you.’ We vanished for a year to an island off the coast of British Columbia. While we were gone, a Taiwan hit team arrived in San Francisco and shot dead the Chinese-American journalist Henry Liu. . . .”
1a. Steve Bannon–one of the luminaries of the “Alt-Right” and a former key Trump aide, was centrally involved in the anti-China effort. This suggests that the presence of Pepe the Frog’s image in the Hong Kong protests might have something to do with the “Alt-Right” after all.
Note Bannon and company’s networking with the Falun Gong cult and “Chinese Muslim Freedom Fighters”–read “Uighurs.”
The Bannon-led anti-China effort has now become U.S. doctrine: ” . . . . Fear of China has spread across the government, from the White House to Congress to federal agencies, where Beijing’s rise is unquestioningly viewed as an economic and national security threat and the defining challenge of the 21st century. . . .”
“A New Red Scare Is Reshaping Washington” by Ana Swanson; The New York Times; 7/20/2019.
In a ballroom across from the Capitol building, an unlikely group of military hawks, populist crusaders, Chinese Muslim freedom fighters [Uighurs–D.E.] and followers of the Falun Gong has been meeting to warn anyone who will listen that China poses an existential threat to the United States that will not end until the Communist Party is overthrown.
If the warnings sound straight out of the Cold War, they are. The Committee on the Present Danger, a long-defunct group that campaigned against the dangers of the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, has recently been revived with the help of Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist, to warn against the dangers of China.
Once dismissed as xenophobes and fringe elements, the group’s members are finding their views increasingly embraced in President Trump’s Washington, where skepticism and mistrust of China have taken hold. Fear of China has spread across the government, from the White House to Congress to federal agencies, where Beijing’s rise is unquestioningly viewed as an economic and national security threat and the defining challenge of the 21st century.
“These are two systems that are incompatible,” Mr. Bannon said of the United States and China. “One side is going to win, and one side is going to lose.” . . . .
1b. There has been much commentary about anti-Asian racism in the U.S. following numerous, sometimes lethal attacks on Asian-Americans in the wake of the pandemic.
Aside from the full-court press against China that we have covered extensively–including and especially the disturbing evidence that the Covid-19 pandemic was deliberately engineered by the U.S.–this should come as no surprise.
Peter Thiel–lynchpin of power in the Trump administration, the top dog in Palantir (the alpha predator of the electronic surveillance milieu), a key player in Facebook–has disseminated anti-Chinese vitriol about the “yellow peril” in Silicon Valley.
He has been joined in that effort by Steve Bannon, a coordinator of anti-China activity in Washington D.C.
” . . . . The billionaire investor Peter Thiel has accused Google of “treason” and called for a law enforcement investigation of the search engine’s parent company. He speculated that the Chinese government has invaded its employee ranks. A German immigrant via South Africa, Thiel is not alone; his remarks echo the repeated assertions of the rabble rouser Steve Bannon that there are too many Asian CEOs in Silicon Valley. These claims, combined with similar charges of wrongdoing against students and professors of Chinese origin on campuses across the country, are as ominous as they are lurid. While Thiel presents no evidence, Bannon displays ample prejudice. They are inspiring paranoia about everyone of Chinese heritage. . . .”
The billionaire investor Peter Thiel has accused Google of “treason” and called for a law enforcement investigation of the search engine’s parent company. He speculated that the Chinese government has invaded its employee ranks. A German immigrant via South Africa, Thiel is not alone; his remarks echo the repeated assertions of the rabble rouser Steve Bannon that there are too many Asian CEOs in Silicon Valley.
These claims, combined with similar charges of wrongdoing against students and professors of Chinese origin on campuses across the country, are as ominous as they are lurid. While Thiel presents no evidence, Bannon displays ample prejudice. They are inspiring paranoia about everyone of Chinese heritage.
At a Sunday appearance which opened the National Conservatism Conference in Washington DC followed by an appearance with the Fox TV host Tucker Carlson, Thiel, the founder of the PayPal financial service, relied on rhetorical questions. He asked Google who was working on artificial intelligence, whether “senior management considers itself to have been thoroughly infiltrated” and if the Chinese would steal the information anyway.
Google answered by reiterating that “we do not work with the Chinese military”.
Thiel left Silicon Valley last year in protest over its liberalism. He is also behind Palantir, the secretive surveillance firm, and has been a supporter of tariffs. Google had been reported to be developing a China-compatible search engine codenamed Dragonfly. They stopped due to employee objections.
The open hostility to Chinese people, as distinct from the Chinese government, violates norms integral to America itself. On the face of these utterances is the identification of a community, named by ancestry, as a problem. Last year, the FBI director, Christopher Wray, characterized it as a “whole of society” threat to American values.
Guilt by association is not what the American dream has promised to those who have sacrificed everything for that proverbial opportunity. Whatever the Chinese government may be up to, their policies should not compromise the status of Chinese people, almost all of whom are ordinary folks, not spies, “sleepers”, agents of influence or otherwise conspirators.
Although in this new Yellow Peril, a specific ethnicity is targeted as a group, no line is drawn between citizens and foreigners. The original Yellow Peril was the notion, promoted by Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II in the late 19th century and by the American author Jack London, that Asians might contend against Europeans and white Americans in a contest of racial superiority. Propagandists such as Lothrop Stoddard wrote titles that would summarize the thesis: The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy was a 1920 bestseller.
Nowadays as earlier, the people who fear an Asian takeover of Silicon Valley do not bother to add that Asians who become Americans are acceptable. They cannot distinguish by looking at a lineup of random Asians, whether the one is a visiting scholar “fresh off the boat” in that pejorative phrase being reappropriated, the other a sixth-generation Californian “banana” (yellow on the outside, white on the inside, in another derogatory term). If they did clarify that they meant no disparagement of those whose families came before their own, at least they would be pure nativists rather than also racists.
The confusion of Asians overseas and “Asian Americans” (a concept coined during the social justice movements circa 1968) has been a recurring theme throughout history. Demagogues succeeded in persuading Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. They argued the “Orientals” would outcompete Occidental rivals but remain loyal to a foreign empire. The prohibition was then expanded to an Asiatic Barred Zone intended to maintain ethnic proportions favoring white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the American population (even Catholics, Jews and Europeans too southern and eastern were to be limited albeit not as strictly). Japanese Americans were locked up during the second world war no matter that they were bona fide United States citizens two generations removed from Tokyo and baseball-playing Christians.
…
3. Among the outgrowths of the Opium Wars was an end to the Qing dynasty’s ban on Chinese emigration and the resultant “coolie trade.”
The Chinese have a long-standing and deserved reputation as good workers. The U.S. and British embrace of the “coolie trade” permitted large numbers of Chinese laborers to be imported into the U.S., where they were widely employed in the silver mining industry and the railroads.
This led to widespread, deadly retaliation by the white establishment against Chinese workers, encouraged by the media and political establishments.
Beheadings, scalping, castration and cannibalism were among the deadly outgrowths of the White Terror against Chinese.
The violence was accompanied by legal restrictions on the immigration by Chinese into the U.S.
4. The program reviews the death threats and intimidation that the authors of Gold Warriors received over the publication of this and other books.
. . . . Many people told us this book was historically important and must be published—then warned us that if it were published, we would be murdered. An Australian economist who read it said, ” I hope they let you live.” He did not have to explain who “they” were.
Japan’s looting of Asia, and the hiding of this war-gold in American banks, is closely linked to the issue of Holocaust gold hidden in Swiss banks. Revealing the secrets of either is a dangerous business. Jean Ziegler, a Swiss professor and parliamentarian, did much to expose five decades of official amnesia in his book The Swiss, the Gold and the Dead. After publishing it and testifying in 1998 before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee about Jewish assets in Swiss banks, he was charged with ‘treason’ by Swiss Federal Prosecutor Carla del Ponte. The charge was brought by twenty-one financiers, commercial lawyers, and politicians of the far right, many of them major stockholders in large Swiss banks. They accused Ziegler of being an accomplice of Jewish organizations who “extorted” vast sums of money from Switzerland.
Ziegler is only one of many who have been persecuted for putting ethics before greed. Christophe Meili, a Union Banque Suisse (UBS) security guard, was threatened with murder and the kidnapping of his wife and children after he testified before a U.S. Senate committee about documents he rescued from UBS shredders. He and his family were given asylum in America.
We have been threatened with murder before. When we published The Soong Dynasty we were warned by a senior CIA official that a hit team was being assembled in Taiwan to come murder us. He said, ‘I would take this very seriously, if I were you.’ We vanished for a year to an island off the coast of British Columbia. While we were gone, a Taiwan hit team arrived in San Francisco and shot dead the Chinese-American journalist Henry Liu.
When we published The Marcos Dynasty we expected trouble from the Marcos family and its cronies, but instead we were harassed by Washington. Others had investigated Marcos, but we were the first to show how the U.S. Government was secretly involved with Marcos gold deals. We came under attack from the U.S. Treasury Department and its Internal Revenue Service, whose agents made threatening midnight phone calls to our elderly parents. Arriving in New York for an author tour, one of us was intercepted at JFK airport, passport seized, and held incommunicado for three hours. Eventually the passport was returned, without a word of explanation. When we ran Freedom of Information queries to see what was behind it, we were grudgingly sent a copy of a telex message, on which every word was blacked out, including the date. The justification given for this censorship was the need to protect government sources, which are above the law.
During one harassing phone call from a U.S. Treasury agent, he said he was sitting in his office watching an interview we had done for a Japanese TV network—an interview broadcast only in Japanese, which we had never seen. After publishing The Yamato Dynasty, which briefly mentioned the discovery that is the basis for Gold Warriors, our phones and email were tapped. We know this because when one of us was in a European clinic briefly for a medical procedure, the head nurse reported that “someone posing as your American doctor” had been on the phone asking questions.
When a brief extract of this book was published in the South China Morning Post in August 2001, several phone calls from the editors were cut off suddenly. Emails from the newspaper took 72 hours to reach us, while copies sent to an associate nearby arrived instantly. In recent months, we began to receive veiled death threats.
What have we done to provoke murder? To borrow a phrase from Jean Ziegler, we are “combating official amnesia.” We live in dangerous times, like Germany in the 1930’s when anyone who makes inconvenient disclosures about hidden assets can be branded a “terrorist” or a “traitor. . . .”
Despite the best efforts of the American and Japanese governments to destroy, withhold, or lose documentation related to Golden Lily, we have accumulated thousands of documents, conducted thousands of hours of interviews, and we make all of these available to readers of this book on two compact discs, available from our website www.bowstring.net [no longer online–D.E.] so they can make up their own minds. We encourage others with knowledge of these events to come forward. When the top is corrupt, the truth will not come from the top. It will emerge in bits and pieces from people like Jean Ziegler and Christophe Meili, who decided they had to “do something.” As a precaution, should anything odd happen, we have arranged for this book and all its documentation to be put up on the Internet at a number of sites. If we are murdered, readers will have no difficulty figuring out who “they” are. . . .
5. Sterling’s fears about Opus Dei and his and Peggy’s proximity to Spain–the seat of that organization’s power turned out to be prescient. On Christmas Day of 2011, he narrowly escaped assassination while returning home. He felt that the attempt on his life may well have been motivated by the publication of the Spanish language edition of Gold Warriors.
“Sterling Seagrave, 1937–2017;” versobooks.com; 7/31/2017.
. . . . Seagrave will be remembered warmly by Verso staff for his lively correspondence. In a 2011 email, he described an attempt on his life that followed the Spanish publication of Gold Warriors:
“A hired thug tried to murder me on the serpentine road leading up to our isolated house on the ridge overlooking Banyuls-sur-Mer, and nearly succeeded. (We’ve had several serious death threats because of our books.) The road was very narrow in places, with tarmac barely the width of my tires. At 10 pm Christmas night, in 2011, after visiting Peggy at a clinic in Perpignan, as I turned the final hairpin, I clearly saw a guy sitting on a cement block path leading up to a shed for the uphill vineyard. He was obviously waiting for me because we were the only people living up there on that mountain shoulder. He jumped up, raised a long pole, and unfurled a black fabric that totally blocked the narrowest turn ahead of me. I tried to swerve to avoid him (not knowing whether he also had a gun), and my right front drive wheel went off the tarmac and lost traction in the rubble.
The car teetered and then plunged down through a steep vineyard on my right side, rolling and bouncing front and rear, 100 meters into a ravine where it finally came to rest against a tree. Thanks to my seatbelt and air bag, I survived. I don’t know how many concussions I got on the way down, but I managed to squeeze out the driver’s door and fell onto the rubble. I got up on my left hand and knees, but my right shoulder caved in. (Turned out later that I had fractured my right shoulder, and all the ligaments there had torn loose.) I passed out and remained unconscious for 14 hours. After 12 hours, a vigneron driving up the next morning saw my wrecked car and body.
He called the Gendarmerie on his portable, and I was hoisted out unconscious by a chopper and flown to an old Victorian-era hospital in Perpignan where they did nothing but keep me doped on morphine for two weeks — no X‑rays or serious medical care. Finally, friends in Banyuls got me (and Peggy) transferred to a clinic on the beach there, where Peggy and I shared a room while we both recovered. I got my right shoulder ligaments fixed by an excellent surgeon in Perpignan. (Peggy did not know it then but she had an early stage of cancer.) I still have a hairline fracture in my right shoulder.
I attribute the event to staying too long in one place, so the spooks eventually tracked me down. We had been living for years on a sailboat, moving from Holland to Britain to Portugal to Spain and finally to France, where we found — in Catalonia — an ideal village at the Mediterranean end of the Pyrenees. In retrospect, I’m sorry I agreed to move ashore for Peggy’s sake, and sold the beautiful 43-foot boat I had built from a bare hull. It was very comfortable, but Peggy wanted a house. We never did find the right house in Banyuls — so we spent 18 years restoring a 13th century Templar ruin on the shoulder of the mountain. Made me an easy target. Definitely a bad decision. I think it was the Spanish edition of Gold Warriors that made me the easy target.
Here’s an evolving story coming out of China that will no doubt fuel the ongoing campaign by Steve Bannon, Peter Thiel, and other reactionaries to foment a sense of ‘Yellow peril’ in Silicon Valley. But it’s also one of those stories that gives us a hint as to why Western leaders view China as such a profound threat in the future. A competitive populist threat in the realm of competing models of capitalism:
The Chinese government is engaged in a growing crackdown on large technology firms operating in the country. Not just foreign tech firms but major domestic firms too like Alibaba and DiDi. The crackdown is being seen as an attempt to limit the explosive growth of these firms with an eye on possible antitrust measures. Yes, China is seriously looking at breaking up its technology giants. It’s an idea that, while likely popular in the West, is absolutely unthinkable in today’s political climate. Just try to imagine the US government breaking up Google or Facebook on the grounds that they’ve become too big and powerful and threat to competition and future growth. A great idea, right? But utterly unthinkable. Facebook, Google, and other large corporations are the ones telling the US government what to do, not the other way around. It’s how the fusion of democracy and capitalism ‘works’ in the West: the capitalist buy the democracy and take over as monopolists. That’s literally what’s been happening for decades with no end in sight. That’s what this move to crackdown on China’s tech giants is so significant. The significance is found in the juxtaposition of China’s action to the West’s chronic inaction in the fact of ever-growing monopolistic and oligopolistic capital.
And don’t forget, while the competition between the West and China today is ostensibly competition between free democracies and an authoritarian government, we would have to be playing dumb to ignore the reality that the dominant forces in the West actively want to move those societies into a post-democratic form of government run by and for private economic forces. In other words, should the fascists in the West succeed in their efforts to effectively destroy democracy, the future Great Powers conflict will be between an brutal post-democratic capitalist far right authoritarianism of the West and whatever kind of capitalist authoritarianism ‘with Chinese characteristics’ that China comes up with. And that’s the kind of competition that’s potentially going to leave the ‘China Model’ looking like the ‘lesser of two evils’ for a globe that’s forces to choose sides. That’s what this story about China’s crackdown on Big Tech is, in part, part of a much larger story about fundamental competitive models for how the world should work:
“The government’s clampdown signals a new era of harsher oversight that companies won’t be able to avoid by registering in the Caymans or hiring in California. The world’s two largest economies seem headed down different paths as they grapple with the sprawling power that private tech companies have amassed. The authoritarian tinge is a risky pivot to some in and around the Chinese tech industry—and others see a chance for the country to gain an edge against its main geopolitical rival. “China is actually taking the lead in setting some boundaries around the power of Big Tech,” says Thomas Tsao, co-founder of Gobi Partners, a venture capital firm based in Shanghai. “People are missing the bigger picture. They’re trying a new model.””
Is China unjustifiably cracking down on free-enterprise? Or is the Chinese government reigning in out-of-control corporate giants before they become large enough to capture society? It’s depends on your perspective. Making this a battle of perspectives. But unlike the Cold War, which was a battle between communist and capitalist perspectives, this is shaping up into a battle of capitalist perspectives. The Western model where capitalism is managed by the capitalist or a Chinese model that prioritizes government control and, ostensibly, the collective good. That’s the bigger picture here. So we’re going to see: do the Chinese people approve of these anti-trust actions or would they prefer people like Jack Ma just gain more and more power and influence? We’ll find out. That’s part of what this is such a big deal. A very different trust-busting model of capitalism that hasn’t been seen in West in decades:
And note the ways China’s crackdown on Chinese giants is seen as potentially benefiting Silicon Valley’s giants: If China makes it harder for Chinese giants to expand, that could help the US giants grow even larger. In other words, one of the consequences of China’s policy could be making Google and Facebook even more powerful in the West. It’s a fascinating dynamic. Don’t forget, the whole world is the audience of this competition. Watching China crack down on Jack Ma while corporate giants continue to dominate US policy-making is going to be part of that global spectacle:
Now, regarding fears about the Chinese government’s plans to set of public anonymized data-sharing infrastructure so corporations can share the troves of data they collect with each other, keep in mind that this sounds A LOT like the EU’s plans to set up public data-sharing infrastructure to facilitate the sharing of data between data-rich and data-poor companies. This was seen as a means of address the near monopoly status internet giants like Google and Facebook have with much of the data they collect. It will be interesting to see how closely the Chinese and EU data-sharing infrastructure models follow each other as this plays out:
Finally, note the attitude expressed by this anonymous Chinese entrepreneur about the prospect of getting so big the Chinese government breaks his company up: that’s winning in life. Not growing so big you take over the world. Not becoming the richest person alive. Not becoming a walking billboard for greed. Getting big enough that the rules of society say you’re too big and accepting the breakup as winning. It’s an attitude that feels so healthy it’s almost alien to hear. Who knows if this anonymous person genuinely holds that sentiment or how widespread it is. But given the collective gross moral failure of the actual capitalist in the West over the last decades — where getting as wealthy as possible, damn the consequences to everyone else, is celebrated as ‘winning’ and almost all of the new wealth has flowed into the hands of the super-rich — it points towards a significant strategic opening for Chinese capitalists in this philosophical battle for the future of capitalism: if China’s wealthiest can at least pretend to exhibit a degree of a broader social conscience they’ll probably win a major public relations battle with the West:
Keep in mind that this future battle over capitalism isn’t going to be taking place in today’s environment. Literally. This foundational battle is going to be taking place in the decrepit dying biosphere of the future. The collapse of the ecosystem, driven by human economic activity, is poised to be the mega-geopolitical issue of the future, barring an event that collapses the global population through some other means (like a killer virus). The gross irresponsibility of the prevailing paradigm is going to be much harder to ignore future, especially for the nations most vulnerable to climate change. Humanity is unavoidably going to be looking for new paradigms to replace the one that is currently mass murdering the future. That’s why moves like this by ‘Communist China’ has the West so freaked out. The Chinese government has determined that not being Big Tech’s pawn is a competitive edge on the global stage. Good for them. Hopefully there will be more competition in this area.
@Pterrafractyl–
Good work!
The notion of China as A) a monolithic Communist giant just does NOT jibe with reality.
I think you hit the nail on the head–China regulating their Big Tech scares the Fresh Fertilizer out of the U.S. oligarchs.
Best,
Dave