The Aged P

…just toasting and ruminating….

Archive for the 'China' Category

Those Chinese Chaps Need To Be Taught A Lesson – Coming Here And Offering Us Money, Indeed….

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Well the state visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to Britain certainly provided an opportunity for some stern finger wagging by a bunch of people who sometimes gave the impression that the sun has not yet set on the British Empire.  They were determined to imply that there were still one or two things that Johnny Foreigner could learn so that he could become a decent chap.

….for too many in the UK, our burgeoning relationship with China is not an economic opportunity. It’s a moralising opportunity, a chance to spruce up Britain’s long-faded sense of imperial superiority, a chance to puff their pigeon chests out and reprimand China with a ‘look here, old boy, this human-rights stuff is just not on’. The political and media focus has not been on the benefits – economic and, yes, non-economic – of China’s largesse; it’s been on Britain’s sense of itself, its role in the world, its do-gooding obligations.

Jeremy Corbyn got in on the act, of course, needing to tell the President, face to face, that things in China were still, simply not good enough. Rather strange for someone of Corbyn’s age and political lineage to follow that path, however, since it was his generation on the late 60s and 70s who were waving little red books and wearing Mao suits. They watched Felix Greene’s rosy hued documentaries describing a workers paradise and wanted the same thing here and now in Britain (conveniently ignoring the mass murders, the labour camps and engineered famines and the sheer bloody incompetence of the communist regime.)

So what changed to turn China into a pariah state for the left?

Capitalism…

The party retained its political grip on government – but the economy was privatised. Wages rose, standards of living improved by leaps and bounds and China became…prosperous and therefore, in the eyes of the left, a bit dirty….

Hence the need for a few lectures to President Xi Jinping which seemed to me a tad tiresome. I was beginning to believe that I was the only one who thought that all this China bashing was just the standard moralising cant beloved of those who get a buzz from gesture politics. How dare the Chinese transform themselves from economic basket case to business super power in just one generation without the aid of Bob Geldof and a whole regiment of concerned bleeding heart NGOs.

But then I read this

 “But the problem with using a ‘distasteful foreign regime’, and endlessly citing China’s ‘appalling human-rights record’, in order to demonstrate and claw back some ersatz moral superiority, some specious sense of national, global purpose, is that it necessarily entails demonising China. It rests on the creation of an evil-doing other, a China that needs to be corrected by its moral betters. Today’s China-bashers pay lip service to the development that has dragged nearly half-a-billion Chinese out of poverty, that has transformed billions of lives, that has laid the foundations for an increasingly prosperous future. But it’s just that – lip service. Their main concern is to use China to boost Britain’s long-flagging sense of purpose, to affirm some vague moral role that Britain supposedly plays on the world stage.”

Good stuff indeed from Tim Black at Spiked! Yet there is something else about all this fuss which I find jarring. The more one thinks about it isn’t there a tinge of racism in all this… posturing? Fu Manchu. the “Yellow Peril” and all that? Anger that even the saintly Jeremy was forced to wear a white tie and hobnob with a bunch of “feudal relics” in order to pleasure a latter day Genghis Khan….and his wife!!!! For once the readers of the Telegraph and the Guardian were spluttering with rage into their porridge/muesli over this humiliation.

It’s as if the inscrutable Chinese have changed the script. Non Europeans have a place in the chattering class scheme of things. They must be seen as “victims” who showbiz celebs tell us we need to help by digging deep into our pockets. But the Chinese have turned the table. They are coming to us with money to invest.

They have made the biggest mistake of all.

They have become…..uppity….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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posted by david in China,UK,UK Politics and have Comments Off on Those Chinese Chaps Need To Be Taught A Lesson – Coming Here And Offering Us Money, Indeed….

New President Of China Hails A Taxi…..Too Good To be True – And It Wasn’t….LOL..

So the great Xi Jinping taxi story (new President of China jumps into a cab to show he’s just an ordinary bloke) proved to be a hoax…..

Red faced media big cheeses in China issued grovelling apologies and, natch, airbrushed the original story from their sites.

But one of the reasons the hoax gained legs was because it sounded exactly like the type of fairy story fantasy “man of the people” pumped out by the agitprop churners of every party based dictatorship.

Beloved Leader “suddenly” decides to leave office, go out onto the street and hail a taxi. A few minutes later the cab deposits said leader outside his humble abode where Mrs Leader is in the midst of cooking noodles…..and, astonishingly, media hacks are present throughout the whole journey.

Fact is these characters are as distant from the great unwashed as any medieval monarch. China, Cuba, North Korea and the jolly old USSR – any communist regime – is based on dynastic rivalries not on any truly democratic process. The party is a divine vanguard whose members know the needs of ordinary people much better than the ordinary people themselves. But, because they claim to rule in the name of the masses, unlike a medieval king whose power came from a hotline to heaven, They have to pretend to be “just like us”…..

Maybe next time his PR guys should suggest a swim……

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posted by david in China,Communism,Uncategorized and have Comments Off on New President Of China Hails A Taxi…..Too Good To be True – And It Wasn’t….LOL..

China & The EU – “Making The World A Safer Place For Bureaucracy”

BELGIUM EU CHINA

 

Pictured above are (from l to r), former Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, Herman Van Rompuy (President of the EU Council) and Jose Manuel Barroso (President of the EU Commission) at a China/EU summit held a few months ago.

What does each of them have in common? They represent the leadership of two powerful global economic blocs that wield power over millions of people.

What else? They reached their positions of power, not through election by millions of their fellow citizens but via a secretive cabal of a select few – the higher echelon of the Communist Party in Wen’s case and  the Heads of State in the EU for the other two.

In other words none of them were mandated by their people via the ballot box. They were essentially selected by their own fellow oligarchs who regard themselves as the elite who deserve to rule rather than submit themselves to whims of the great unwashed.

Indeed Barroso (a Maoist revolutionary in his Portuguese student days) has been quoted as fully supportive of that elite notion.

Governments are not always right. If governments were always right we would not have the situation that we have today. Decisions taken by the most democratic institutions in the world are very often wrong.

Ah, the government of the experts or, as Thomas Sowell called them, The Anointed, so much cleverer than the voting masses who do not have the brains to understand the complexities of thw world’s problems…

Really?

Voters, being human, can make mistakes. But it doesn’t follow that a class of experts would have made a better decision. Just think about some of the positions that “the experts” have taken down the ages. In the 1920s, they were for returning to gold at the pre-war rate. In the 1930s, they were for appeasement. In the 1940s, they were for nationalisation. In the 1950s they were for state planning. In the 1960s, they were for mixed-ability, child-centred teaching. In the 1970s, they were for price controls. In the 1980s, they were for the ERM. In the 1990s they were for the euro. In our own decade, they were for the bail-outs and stimulus packages.

Or, as William Buckley once put it

 

“I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard.”

Well, Mr Buckley – China and the EU would certainly not agree with you on that point..

China and the EU – “Making the world a safer place for bureaucracy”

Why is it that Franz Kafka is never around when you need him…

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posted by david in China,EU and have Comments Off on China & The EU – “Making The World A Safer Place For Bureaucracy”

Hua Shan Plank Walk – 20 Inches Wide Overlooking A Gorge 3,000 Ft Below..

Hua Shan is a mountain in the Shaanxi Province of China, about 120 kilometres east of the city of Xi’an and is more than 2000 metres in height. Cut into the side of the mountain and overlooking a deep gorge is a pathway made up of three planks laid on top of iron bolts drilled into the rockface.

Walking along the planks, even with a safety harness, is terrifying but, if you fancy an adrenalin rush, this is the path to travel…..

The first view of the only 0.3 metres wide planks was simply and quite literally breathtaking: The half-rotten planks lay on some iron bolts that were drilled into the mountain every five meters or so and were held together by a few rusty nails. Walking onto the planks leaves you with nothing below you for at least a 1000 meters……………………………………… I am not sure how dangerous the walk actually is, but all three of us were holding on for dear life and walking ever so slowly, making sure we did not slip or let go of the handrail (unless we had to clip the harness into the next section).

Suggestion….cut the annoying music on the vid..

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posted by david in Asia,China,Outdoors,Travel and have Comments Off on Hua Shan Plank Walk – 20 Inches Wide Overlooking A Gorge 3,000 Ft Below..
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