Another fine mess the Chinese have gotten us into?

I see no reason for seeing Chinese values as incompatible with “ours”. As I see it, it’s a matter of degree. With a huge population and its requirements for an equitable and sufficient production of life’s essentials, Chinese society has evolved over millennia a set of values not unlike our own, but characterised by more cohesion and conformity than our own, and with less importance accorded to individuation.

The huge energy emerging from the rise of China suggests that their approach is at least as successful as our own in satisfying needs and maintaining harmonious relations with non-Chinese entities through trade and cultural exchanges.

Whatever excesses may or may not have been visited on its near neighbours, China has not visited Hell-on-earth outside its borders in the same way that America has in the last sixty years. That level of incompatibility with Chinese values is, for me, very much to be welcomed.

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Problem is Jane it’s maybe too late. It’s not only Chinese products. In their endless search for “shareholder value” (ie share growth driven by executive share options) many, many US companies have come to rely totally on Chinese low cost manufacturing. Without it they’d go wallop. The Chinese have US and other countries industry by the gonads.

Interesting article here about the near slave conditions in factories making goods for our markets. There are no end of “respectable” Western companies that turn a blind eye to Chinese worker exploitation.

That’s what we have to wean ourselves off and it won’t be easy.

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I don’t think that those living in the camps, sorry schools, would agree with you.
Of course, it is a crime to think for yourself in China, and they are taking over by stealth indebtedness.
The Chinese Ambassador to Australia threatened as below:

Australia’s longest serving foreign minister says not since the Cold War has he seen an ambassador behave as “recklessly” as China’s ambassador to Australia did this week.

The Federal Government has described Ambassador Jingye Cheng’s comments in an interview with the Australian Financial Review as “threats of economic coercion”.

Mr Cheng suggested the Chinese public may boycott Australian products or decide not to visit Australia in the future if the Government continued its push for an inquiry into the origins of COVID-19.

“If the mood is going from bad to worse, people would think ‘Why should we go to such a country that is not so friendly to China?’,” he told the paper.

“Maybe the ordinary people will say ‘why should we drink Australian wine? Eat Australian beef?’”

Or, just perhaps, they would be ordered not to!

It’s by no means conclusive but it is interesting,

Ye gods and little fishes, Jane! It’s an outright declaration of World War 3. We’re doomed, aye! We’re all doomed!! :earth_americas::fire::scream:

That’s interesting. Strange though how it would develop independently in multiple locations. If so I suppose Trump would just start blaming China AND Europe. I don’t fancy having multiple strains of it around.

While I admire Australia’s stance, I think a large part of their economic success, particularly in mining, is as a result of Chinese growth. it may well end up as a he who payes the piper calls the tune situation. iI have no doubt whatsoever the Chinese regime would wallop any weaker country if it suited them.

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I think we might well be Peter. The economic strength that has been handed to the Chinese regime is very dangerous. The Yanks have been monofocussed on the old enemy, Russia, while China has sucked their blood.

What goes around comes around, John.

But I outgrew roundabouts after graduating from the cissy sit-on one to the ‘Spider’ when I was about 8 :spider_web::laughing:

I think you hit the nail on the head there, John.
But we are sitting on the event horizon of an economic black hole. Businesses have become profit generating machines that are constantly looking for ways to increase the manufacturing cost/selling price ratio. Their ultimate goal is to reduce manufacturing cost to zero. We are now within sight of a time when manufacture can be totally robotised and human labour can be eliminated. Even sales and delivery could be entirely taken over by machines. But the question then arises, how will people without jobs be able to get the money to buy the junk they want to sell us? No longer my problem. The next generation will have to sort that one out.

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This is part of the case for universal basic income - and why the socialist candidate Hamon in the last presidential election advocated this - and paying for it (in part) by taxing robots.
Actually more economically literate than Macron - and might have put France in a much better position to cope with the current crisis.

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Oh dear Mike! I didn’t expect a man of your distinction to be so defeatist!

If you can diagnose the cause of the sickness so accurately as you do, is the treatment not as demonstrably clear?

If unbridled consumer capitalism is at the heart of our progressively fatal economic disease (‘consumption’ being the old feared word for TB, which cavitated the lungs till all that remained were lifeless bags of pus and blood), then it must be overthrown, and the fresh air of scientific socialism applied to redeem us.

That’s possible, but not if people cling to old ideas, and the suicidal (and murderous) philosophies that underpin them, in the prostituted name of ‘freedom’ (for the ‘chosen people’ of a White Patriarchal God).:pray::thinking::smiley:

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Not that easy, Peter.
You have lived almost as long as I have and must have noticed how the concept of wealth has changed.
When we first went to work, we got paid every Friday in actual banknotes and coins that came in a special envelope that made it possible to count the money without opening it. That was what you had to last the week. It was what you got in exchange for 38 hours work. It paid for your basic needs and you might have a bit left for some luxuries, or you could save it for a “rainy day.” If you wanted something special, you would save until you could afford it. There was the never-never, but it was regarded as being a bit disreputable - best avoided.
Everything changed in the 60s with the arrival of credit cards. Suddenly debt became respectable. Cash in hand was no longer needed, it was your credit limit that was the measure of your worth. The gold standard had long gone and wealth became a theoretical concept that only worked because everyone had confidence that things would carry on in much the same way.
Now we have gone even further down that path and notes and coins are no longer needed. Just flash your card or smartphone and the deal is done. Use up your credit, get an overdraft, pay off the interest automatically without even bothering to wonder what it is costing you. Don’t stop and think about it or you might realize the truth - you have sold your future!
Our children have sold their future to get an education! Old people have been persuaded to sell their houses in anticipation of their death!
Why does that matter? It matters because there is much less real wealth in the world than we pretend.
Hints of that have been seen all along with recessions, burst bubbles and bank crashes. Capitalism no longer works, it is built on sand and whatever is done to prop it up, it will eventually fail in the next crash - or the one after that. As Warren Buffet said, “When the tide goes out you can tell who has been swimming naked.”
The answer to that is we all have been swimming naked. The money governments have been spending to get us through Covid-19 is invented money. It doesn’t exist in any real sense, it’s just an idea in peoples minds.
When this is all over, we will have to accept that we are all going to be a lot poorer.
The idea of a basic wage for everyone is appealing, but I don’t see how it could work. Would everyone be happy to have only the same as the next man?
I suppose that it is possible to imagine a future when machine do all the work. But if they are going to work for ordinary citizens, they would have to be nationalised. Then we might be able to live like the Ancient Greeks, but with mechanical slaves instead of human ones. How did they spend their time - philosophising and learning how the world worked and playing games and going to war. But they must have had their fair share of idiots and layabouts and greedy speculators and power hungry politicians.
So the question arises, how will we justify our existence? How will we value ourselves as human beings?

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You have to larf, don’t you…

" Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again" Brecht.

China and the despots that run it are a major worry IMO.

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Yes Mike.
When I started out corporations, at least the respected ones, operated for the benefit of shareholders, the community and the employees. The proliferation of share price executive based incentive packages changed all that. Even now in the middle of all this mess CEOs are gallantly taking pay cuts - but they are getting options to compensate. Since the share prices are so deflated now, if their company survives the options will more than offset the notional hits that are taking to their base pay. Of course, this is not available to the rank and file in the organisations.

What makes me mad is that, win or lose, these guys seem to always walk away with a shedload of money, regardless of the damage they have done to the company and its employees.

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They say "Don’t get mad, get even’. The system itself, its architects and protectors, its cheerleaders, vain symbols, propagandists and enforcers are rotten and need to be usurped, cleared out, disempowered and not permitted to wreak havoc again. That requires resolute and courageous action. To the limits of my capacities I would give my utmost and to those ends, and many are of similar disposition.

We are not free, we are enchained. But freedom is within our grasp, and Covid 19 has supplied a means, while the old order of anaesthetised ‘normal life’ is shuddering and on its knees, to make all things new.

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Hi all, sadly China has a lot to answer for as a nation. The terrible mistreatment of both people and animals is, I believe, second to none in the world. I can list so many atrocities from dying rooms in orphanages, concentration camps for muslims, the current hideous racism against black Africans over coronavirus to bear bile farming, wildlife markets, the most hideous slaughter methods of dogs and cats such that you would not believe, the Yulin dog meat festival (look that up if you have a stomach of steel), disgusting circuses with their vicious treatment of animals, tiger/lion farms breeding animals for use in quack medicines that don’t work and the list goes on. It’s an endless list of cruelty and suffering like nowhere else. I know some of these dreadful things go on elsewhere in the world but not on the scale and magnitude of China.
I avoid Chinese products as much as I can although that makes shopping a lot more difficult. I currently have an old Samsung phone that needs replacing and will buy the same brand again as it’s one of the very few not made in China. Electrical goods are difficult but Neff ovens, for example, are made in Europe.
Nothing will convince me that China is a country worthy of respect.
Peace
Izzy x

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